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

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

We are currently trapped in the illusion of growth. The belief that all businesses should grow indefinitely. To expand their business, profits, and workforce… Everything in nature is circular, so there’s nothing natural about this growth craze.

Angelos Arnis • Designing for the last earth

When we fail, we often conceal it, distort it, or deny it. We make the facts fit our self-serving theory rather than adjust the theory to fit the facts. We attribute our failure to factors beyond our control. In our own failures, we overestimate the role of bad luck (“Better luck next time”). We blame the failure on someone else (“She got the job

Ozan Varol • Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

In data analysis, survival bias is taking the known into account while neglecting the unknown (which nevertheless exists).

Roman Zykov • Roman's Data Science: How to monetize your data

survivorship bias

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.

The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect. This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you

Cal Newport • Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

the Zeigarnik effect

The implication of these studies is that this so-called “selective exposure bias” may be pushing us into more polarised positions.

This cognitive bias can push people into more extreme ideological positions | BPS

The faster you’re moving the more you’re in fear. The more you’re in fear, the more you’re thinking about yourself. The more you’re thinking about yourself, the less compassion and kindness you have for others.

from this Reel.

and that is why urgency/speed and fear are so great mind control tools, they reduce our cognition to “survival mode” program and nothing more

cognitive dissonance