mind traps

“In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life (...) we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”

from Think Again by Adam Grant

baja

Anchors can even influence how you think your life is going. In one experiment, college students were asked two questions: (a) How happy are you? (b) How often are you dating?

Richard H. Thaler • Nudge: The Final Edition

the anchoring effect

“Hope clouds observation.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Dune Quotes by Frank Herbert

A rational decision-maker would simply ignore the bad options and keep waiting for the neutral-to-good ones. Alas, humans are prone to availability bias, so each additional bad option can go to your head. Instead of waiting, you’ll be tempted to lower your standards.

Cassie Kozyrkov • How I navigated my biggest career transition

Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

James Clear • Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

survivorship bias

It makes sense that constant comparison makes us unhappy. I think back to a study I read a few years ago. When passengers board an airplane and walk through first-class on their way to their seats, passengers are then more likely to engage in acts of air rage and aggression than when they board from the middle of the plane. Subtle reminders of our... See more

Musicto Mail

All people are flawed, a mix of good and bad, but we tend to see others as only one thing. The philosopher Amartya Sen calls this a “solitarist” approach to identity. And as we are biased toward negativity — a bad apple spoils the bunch — we are thrown off by a person’s bad character traits or past actions. Even minor ones. We identify people by... See more

Tim Gorichanaz • Finding Heroes In A Messy Digital World | NOEMA

We identify people by the worst thing they’ve ever done.

How to free yourself from "hindsight bias”

Josh Kaufman bigthink.com

Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2]

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse

Charles Goodhart • Goodhart's law

For hundreds of years, “Occam’s razor” has been a go-to in any critical thinker’s mental toolbox. Also known as the “principle of parsimony,” this heuristic (read: a mental shortcut) is often summarized as: “When you have two competing explanations for the same phenomenon, the simpler one is the better.”