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

“Hope clouds observation.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Dune Quotes by Frank Herbert

About three quarters of students are convinced that revising their answer will hurt their score. Kaplan, the big test-prep company, once warned students to “exercise great caution if you decide to change an answer.4 Experience indicates that many students who change answers change to the wrong answer.” With all due respect to the lessons of

Adam Grant • Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

first-instinct fallacy

But just as there are reasons why these design patterns won out, we shouldn't let survivor bias blind us to their inherent tradeoffs. The next wave of social startups should learn from the weaknesses of some of these choices of our current social incumbents

Eugene Wei • And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep

survivorship bias

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

100 Little Ideas

Morgan Housel collabfund.com

The planning fallacy describes our natural bias when forecasting our own productivity: we focus on the best-case scenario, or something dangerously close to it. Rarely does that scenario play out.

David Epstein • Why You Should Plan To Get Less Done

planning fallacy

In psychology, the Ovsiankina effect describes the innate human urge to finish tasks we've initiated. This tendency to resume an interrupted action is especially prevalent when the action hasn't yet been achieved.[1] The effect is named after Maria Ovsiankina, who conducted research on this behavior.

Maria Ovsiankina • Ovsiankina effect

Ovsiankina effect

But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken

Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

Zeigarnik effect

Earlier I discussed the bewildering variety of priming effects, in which your thoughts and behavior may be influenced by stimuli to which you pay no attention at all, and even by stimuli of which you are completely unaware. The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by

Daniel Kahneman • Thinking, Fast and Slow

priming effects