Hanlon’s Razor — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.” (related: fundamental attribution error — “ the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the agent (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining another person’s behavior in a given situation.”)
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Occam’s Razor — “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” (related: conjunction fallacy, overfitting, “when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.”)
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Proximate vs Root Cause — “A proximate cause is an event which is closest to, or immediately responsible for causing, some observed result. This exists in contrast to a higher-level ultimate cause (or distal cause) which is usually thought of as the ‘real’ reason something occurred.” (related: 5 whys — “to determine the root cause of a defect or problem by repeating the question ‘Why?’)
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Systems Thinking — “By taking the overall system as well as its parts into account systems thinking is designed to avoid potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences.” (related: causal loop diagrams; stock and flow; Le Chatelier’s principle, hysteresis — “the time-based dependence of a system’s output on present and past inputs.”; “Can’t see the forest for the trees.”)
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Physics
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Brainstorming
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Divergent Thinking vs Convergent Thinking — “Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It is often used in conjunction with its cognitive opposite, convergent thinking, which follows a particular set of logical steps to arrive at one solution, which in some cases is a ‘correct’ solution.” (related: groupthink; Maslow’s hammer — “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”)
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Crowdsourcing — “The process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially an online community, rather than from employees or suppliers.” (related: wisdom of the crowd — “a large group’s aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group.”; collective intelligence; bandwagon effect — “a phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others.”; Stone Soup)
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Planck’s principle — “the view that scientific change does not occur because individual scientists change their mind, but rather that successive generations of scientists have different views.”
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- [note::Reminds me of: "science advances one funeral at a time"]

Experimenting
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Observer Effect — “Changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed.”
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Survivorship Bias — “The logical error of concentrating on the people or things that ‘survived’ some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility.”
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Interpreting
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Regression to the Mean — “The phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on its second measurement.” (related: Pendulum swing; variance; Gambler’s fallacy)
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Simpson’s Paradox — “A paradox in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.”
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Deciding
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Local vs Global Optimum — “A local optimum of an optimization problem is a solution that is optimal (either maximal or minimal) within a neighboring set of candidate solutions. This is in contrast to a global optimum, which is the optimal solution among all possible solutions, not just those in a particular neighborhood of values.”
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Decision Trees — “A decision support tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility.” (related: expected value)
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Reasoning
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Negotiating
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The Third Story — “The Third Story is one an impartial observer, such as a mediator, would tell; it’s a version of events both sides can agree on.” (related: Most Respectful Interpretation)
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Zero-sum vs Non-zero-sum — “A zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s)…In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties’ aggregate gains and losses can be less than or more than zero.” (related: win-win — “A win–win strategy is a conflict resolution process that aims to accommodate all disputants.”)
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- [note::Is this the same as finite v.s. infinite games (a la Simon Sinek)?]

Prisoner’s Dilemma — “A standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely ‘rational’ individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so.” (related: Nash equilibrium, evolutionarily stable strategy)
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Mitigating
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Unintended Consequences — “Outcomes that are not the ones foreseen and intended by a purposeful action.” (related: collateral damage — “Deaths, injuries, or other damage inflicted on an unintended target.”, Goodhart’s law — “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”; Campbell’s law; Streisand Effect — “The phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet”; cobra effect — “when an attempted solution to a problem actually makes the problem worse.”; “Kick a hornet’s nest.”)
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Preserving Optionality — “A strategy of keeping options open and fluid, fighting the urge to make choices too soon, before all of the uncertainties have been resolved.” (related: tyranny of small decisions — “a situation where a series of small, individually rational decisions can negatively change the context of subsequent choices, even to the point where desired alternatives are irreversibly destroyed.”; boiling frog — “an anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive.”; path dependence; “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”; fog of war; OODA loop)
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Precautionary Principle — “If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus (that the action or policy is not harmful), the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action that may or may not be a risk.”
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Managing
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Forcing Function — “A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.”
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Directly Responsible Individual — A management concept, originally championed by Apple, that good things come if someone is explicitly responsible for something. (related: diffusion of responsibility — “a sociopsychological phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present.”; bystander effect — “a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present.”)
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Pygmalion Effect — “The phenomenon whereby higher expectations lead to an increase in performance.” (related: market pull technology policy — where the government sets future standards beyond what the current market can deliver, and the market pulls that technology into existence.; Radical Candor)
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Organizational Debt — “All the people/culture compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup.”
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Consequence vs Conviction — “Where there is low consequence and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate. And delegate completely, let people make mistakes and learn. On the other side, obviously where the consequences are dramatic and you have extremely high conviction that you are right, you actually can’t let your junior colleague make a mistake.”
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High-context vs Low-context Culture — “In a higher-context culture, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture explain. Words and word choice become very important in higher-context communication, since a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group (but less effectively outside that group), while in a low-context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.”
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- [note::What are the advantages of a high-context culture? My impression is that "letting the culture explain" will only lead to bad assumptions and misaligned expectations.]

Peter Principle — “The selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate’s performance in their current role, rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and ‘managers rise to the level of their incompetence.’”
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Loyalists vs Mercenaries — “There are highly loyal teams that can withstand almost anything and remain steadfastly behind their leader. And there are teams that are entirely mercenary and will walk out without thinking twice about it.”
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Developing
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Design Pattern — “The re-usable form of a solution to a design problem.” (related: anti-pattern — “a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive.”, dark pattern — “user interfaces designed to trick people.”)
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Business
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Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — “A product with just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development.” (related: perfect is the enemy of good; de-risking; Customer Development, “Get out of the building.”)
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Product/Market Fit — “the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand.” (related: pivot — “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.”, “rebuilding year”)
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Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions — For reversible decisions: “If the decision was a bad call you can unwind it in a reasonable period of time. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. These are usually difficult or impossible to reverse.” (related: Jeff Bezos on Type 1, Type 2 decisions)
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Capital Allocation Options — “Five capital allocation choices CEOs have: 1) invest in existing operations; 2) acquire other businesses; 3) issue dividends; 4) pay down debt; 5) repurchase stock. Along with this, they have three means of generating capital: 1) internal/operational cash flow; 2) debt issuance; 3) equity issuance.”
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Open Platform vs Closed Platform — “A closed platform, walled garden or closed ecosystem is a software system where the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, where consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications, content, and much more.”
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Luck Surface Area — “When you do something you’re excited about you will naturally pull others into your orbit. And the more people with whom you share your passion, the more who will be pulled into your orbit.”
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- [note::Ooo I love this phrasing! I've often heard it termed "opportunity surface area"]

Hunting Elephants vs Flies — “Salespeople sometimes refer to ‘elephants’, ‘deers’ and ‘rabbits’ when they talk about the first three categories of customers. To extend the metaphor to the 4th and 5th type of customer, let’s call them ‘mice” and “flies’. So how can you hunt 1,000 elephants, 10,000 deers, 100,000 rabbits, 1,000,000 mice or 10,000,000 flies?” (related: brontosaurus, whale, and microbe)
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Influencing
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Framing — “With the same information being used as a base, the ‘frame’ surrounding the issue can change the reader’s perception without having to alter the actual facts.” (related: anchoring)
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Cialdini’s Six Principles of Influence — Reciprocity (“People tend to return a favor.”), Commitment (“If people commit…they are more likely to honor that commitment.”), Social Proof (“People will do things they see other people are doing.”), Authority (“People will tend to obey authority figures.”), Liking (“People are easily persuaded by other people they like.”), and Scarcity (“Perceived scarcity will generate demand”). (related: foot-in-the-door technique)
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- [note::Nice framework to pair with the ideas from Never Split The Difference]

Paradox of Choice — “Eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers.” (related: Hick’s Law, “increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.”)
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Marketing
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Bullseye Framework — “With nineteen traction channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s why we’ve created a simple framework called Bullseye that will help you find the channel that will get you traction.”
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Technology Adoption Lifecycle — “Describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or “bell curve”. The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called ‘innovators’, followed by ‘early adopters’. Next come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called ‘laggards’.” (related: S-curve, Crossing the Chasm, Installation Period vs Deployment Period)
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Jobs To Be Done — “Consumers usually don’t go about their shopping by conforming to particular segments. Rather, they take life as it comes. And when faced with a job that needs doing, they essentially ‘hire’ a product to do that job.”
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Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) — “A disinformation strategy used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.”
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Competing
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Winner Take All Market — A market that tends towards one dominant player. (related: lock-in; monopoly; monopsony)
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Two-sided Market — “Economic platforms having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits.”
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Barriers to Entry — “A cost that must be incurred by a new entrant into a market that incumbents don’t or haven’t had to incur.”
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Price Elasticity — “The measurement of how responsive an economic variable is to a change in another. It gives answers to questions such as ‘If I lower the price of a product, how much more will sell?’” (related: Giffen good — “a product that people consume more of as the price rises and vice versa.”)
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Market Power — “The ability of a firm to profitably raise the market price of a good or service over marginal cost.”
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First-mover advantage vs First-mover disadvantage — “the advantage gained by the initial (“first-moving”) significant occupant of a market segment.” (related: Why now?)
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Strategizing
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Sustainable Competitive Advantage — Structural factors that allow a firm to outcompete its rivals for many years.
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Core Competency — “A harmonized combination of multiple resources and skills that distinguish a firm in the marketplace.” (related: circle of competence — “you don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”)
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Strategy vs Tactics — Sun Tzu: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
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Sphere of Influence — “A spatial region or concept division over which a state or organization has a level of cultural, economic, military, or political exclusivity, accommodating to the interests of powers outside the borders of the state that controls it.”
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Unknown Unknowns — “Known unknowns refers to ‘risks you are aware of, such as cancelled flights….’ Unknown unknowns are risks that ‘come from situations that are so out of this world that they never occur to you.’ (related: Cynefin framework)
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Switching Costs — “The costs associated with switching suppliers.”
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Network Effect — “The effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.”
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Military
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Rumsfeld’s Rule — “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” (related: Joy’s law — “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”; Effectuation)
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Exit Strategy — “A means of leaving one’s current situation, either after a predetermined objective has been achieved, or as a strategy to mitigate failure.”
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Winning Hearts and Minds — “In which one side seeks to prevail not by the use of superior force, but by making emotional or intellectual appeals to sway supporters of the other side.”
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Containment — “A military strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is best known as the Cold War policy of the United States and its allies to prevent the spread of communism abroad.”
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- [note::How has this strategy been used in a business context?]

Appeasement — “A diplomatic policy of making political or material concessions to an enemy power in order to avoid conflict.” (related: Danegeld, extortion)
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History
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Sports
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Unforced Error — In tennis, an “error in a service or return shot that cannot be attributed to any factor other than poor judgement and execution by the player; contrasted with a forced error,” “an error caused by an opponent’s good play.”
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Market Failure
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Social vs Market Norms — “People are happy to do things occasionally when they are not paid for them. In fact there are some situations in which work output is negatively affected by payment of small amounts of money.”
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Information Asymmetry — “The study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other.” (related: adverse selection — “when traders with better private information about the quality of a product will selectively participate in trades which benefit them the most.”; moral hazard — “when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks.”)
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Externalities — “An externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit.” (related: tragedy of the commons — “A situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource through their collective action”; free rider problem — “when those who benefit from resources, goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an under-provision of those goods or services.”; Coase theorem — “if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to a Pareto efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.”; NIMBY — “Not In My Back Yard”)
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Political Failure
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Third Rail — “The third rail of a nation’s politics is a metaphor for any issue so controversial that it is ‘charged’ and ‘untouchable’ to the extent that any politician or public official who dares to broach the subject will invariably suffer politically.”
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Regulatory Capture — “When a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.” (related: Shirky principle — “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”; “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”)
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Duverger’s Law — “A principle which states that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system, and that ‘the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism.’”
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- [note::Never knew there was a name for this!]

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem — “When voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a pre-specified set of criteria.” (related: approval voting)
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Investing
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Learning
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Deliberate Practice — “How expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times.”
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- [note::"Practice doesn't make perfect - deliberate practice makes perfect"]

Imposter Syndrome — “High-achieving individuals marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.”
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Dunning-Kruger Effect — “Relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is…[and] highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.” (related: overconfidence effect)
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- [note::It's so hard to tell where imposter syndrome ends and where dunning-kruger begins.]

Spacing Effect — “The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session.”
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Productivity
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Focus on High-leverage Activities — “Leverage should be the central, guiding metric that helps you determine where to focus your time.” (related: Eisenhower decision matrix — “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”, law of triviality — “members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.”)
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Makers vs Manager’s Schedule — “When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster.” (related: Deep Work)
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Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong, will.” (related: Hofstadter’s Law, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”)
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Parkinson’s Law — “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
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Gate’s Law — “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
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Nature
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Filling a Vacuum — A vacuum “is space void of matter.” Filling a vacuum refers to the fact that if a vacuum is put next to something with pressure, it will be quickly filled by the gas producing that pressure. (related: power vacuum)
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Emergence — “Whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.” (related: decentralized system, spontaneous order)
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Natural Selection — “The differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in heritable traits of a population over time.”
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Butterfly Effect — “The concept that small causes can have large effects.” (related: bullwhip effect — “increasing swings in inventory in response to shifts in customer demand as you move further up the supply chain.”)
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Philosophy
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Distributive Justice vs Procedural Justice — “Procedural justice concerns the fairness and the transparency of the processes by which decisions are made, and may be contrasted with distributive justice (fairness in the distribution of rights or resources), and retributive justice (fairness in the punishment of wrongs).”
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Internet
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Filter Bubble — “In which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user (such as location, past click behavior and search history) and, as a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.” (related: echo chamber)
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Godwin’s Law — “If an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.” (related: “Take the high road.”, “Rise above the fray.”, “Don’t stoop down to their level.”)
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