Base Rates: The success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try.
- View Highlight
-

Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try doesn’t apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do things differently than everyone else.
- View Highlight
-

Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::"1 death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
Didn't know there was a term for this!]

System Justification Theory: Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity.
- View Highlight
-

Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighborhood and you panic.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::"If 3 people say the job market is bad... is it really bad or are they just unlucky/bad, applying to jobs above their level, etc?"]

Buridan’s Ass: A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose. A form of decision paralysis.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::It's me! I'm the donkey! 😅]

Cumulative advantage: Social status snowballs in either direction because people like associating with successful people, so doors are opened for them, and avoid associating with unsuccessful people, for whom doors are closed.
- View Highlight
-

Anscombe’s Quartet: Four sets of numbers that look identical on paper (mean average, variance, correlation, etc.) but look completely different when graphed. Describes a situation where exact calculations don’t offer a good representation of how the world works.
- View Highlight
-

- View Highlight
-

Ringelmann Effect: Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.”
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Reminds me of social loafing]

False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how widely held your own beliefs are, caused by the difficulty of imagining the experiences of other people
- View Highlight
-
- [note::The opposite of pluralistic ignorance?]

Boomerang Effect: Trying to persuade someone to do one thing can make them more likely to do the opposite, because the act of persuasion can feel like someone stealing your freedom and doing the opposite makes you feel like you’re taking your freedom back.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::e.g. children rebelling]

Chronological Snobbery: “The assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also ‘a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.” – C.S. Lewis
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Out of Date/Fashion != Incorrect/Wrong]

Planck’s Principle: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
- View Highlight
-

McNamara Fallacy: A belief that rational decisions can be made with quantitative measures alone, when in fact the things you can’t measure are often the most consequential. Named after Defense Secretary McNamara, who tried to quantify every aspect of the Vietnam War.
- View Highlight
-

Courtesy Bias: Giving opinions that are likely to offend people the least, rather than what you actually believe.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::I have exhibited this countless times]

Group Attribution Error: Incorrectly assuming that the views of a group member reflect those of the whole group.
- View Highlight
-

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: Noticing an idea everywhere you look as soon as it’s brought to your attention in a way that makes you overestimate its prevalence.
- View Highlight
-

Normalcy Bias: Underestimating the odds of disaster because it’s comforting to assume things will keep functioning the way they’ve always functioned.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Every AI accelerationist ever]

Actor-Observer Asymmetry: We judge others based solely on their actions, but when judging ourselves we have an internal dialogue that justifies our mistakes and bad decisions.
- View Highlight
-

The 90-9-1 Rule: In social media networks, 90% of users just read content, 9% of users contribute a little content, and 1% of users contribute almost all the content. Gives a false impression of what ideas are popular or “average.”
- View Highlight
-

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Goals set retroactively after an activity, like shooting a blank wall and then drawing a bullseye around the holes you left, or picking a benchmark after you’ve invested.
- View Highlight
-

Poisoning the Well: Presenting irrelevant adverse information about someone in a way that makes everything else that person says seem untrustworthy. “Before you hear my opponent’s healthcare plan, let me remind you that he got a DUI in college.”
- View Highlight
-

Golem Effect: Performance declines when supervisors/teachers have low expectations of your abilities.
- View Highlight
-

Appeal to Consequences: Arguing that a hypothesis must be true (or false) because the outcome is something you like (or dislike). The classic example is arguing that climate change isn’t real because combating climate change will hurt the economy.
- View Highlight
-

Plain Folks Fallacy: People of authority acquiring trust by presenting themselves as Average Joe’s, when in fact their authority proves they are different from everyone else.
- View Highlight
-

Apophenia: A tendency to perceive correlations between unrelated things, because your mind can only deal with tiny sample sizes and assuming things are correlated creates easy/comforting explanations of how the world works.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Interesting! Is this why systems/complexity thinking is unintuitive?]

Self-Handicapping: Avoiding effort because you don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of that effort failing.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Oof... I think I do this a lot - not trying or not trying hard because if I fail I can say "well, I didn't care much anyway"]

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
- View Highlight
-

False Uniqueness Effect: Assuming your skills are unique when they’re not. Comes from conflating “I’m good at this” with “Others are bad at this.”
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Related: Dunning Kruger Effect]

Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.
- View Highlight
-

Non-Ergodic: When group probabilities don’t apply to singular events. If 100 people play Russian Roulette once, the odds of dying might be, say, 10%. But if one person plays Russian Roulette 100 times, the odds are dying are practically 100%.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Pollyanna Principle: It’s easier to remember happy memories than bad ones.
Declinism: Perpetually viewing society as in decline, because you’re afflicted by the Pollyanna Principle and you forget how much things sucked in the past.)
- View Highlight
-

Empathy Gap: Underestimating how you’ll behave when you’re “hot” (angry/aroused/rushed), caused by the inability to accurately foresee how your body’s physical response to situations (dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) will influence decision-making.
- View Highlight
-

Abilene Paradox: A group decides to do something that no one in the group wants to do because everyone mistakenly assumes they’re the only ones who object to the idea and they don’t want to rock the boat by speaking up.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::How does this differ from pluralistic ignorance?]

Hawthorne Effect: Being watched/studied changes how people behave, making it difficult to conduct social studies that accurately reflect the real world
- View Highlight
-

Weasel Words: Phrases that appear to have meaning but convey nothing tangible. “Growth was solid last quarter,” or “Many people believe.”
- View Highlight
-

Hormesis: Something that hurts you in a high dose can be good for you in small doses. (Weight on your bones, drinking red wine, etc.)
- View Highlight
-

Backfiring Effect: A supercharged version of confirmation bias where being presented with evidence that goes against your beliefs makes you double down on your initial beliefs because you feel you’re being attacked.
- View Highlight
-

Friendship Paradox: On average, people have fewer friends than their friends have. Occurs because people with an abnormally high number of friends are more likely to be one of your friends. It’s a fundamental part of social network dynamics and makes most people feel less popular than they are.
- View Highlight
-

Hedonic Treadmill: Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.
- View Highlight
-

Foundational Species: A single thing that plays an outsized role in supporting an ecosystem, whose loss would pull down many others with it. In nature: kelp, algae, and coral. In business: The Federal Reserve and Amazon.
- View Highlight
-

Bizarreness Effect: Crazy things are easier to remember than common things, providing a distorted sense of “normal.”
- View Highlight
-

Moderating Relationship: The correlation between two variables depends on a third, seemingly unrelated variable. The quality of a marriage may be dependent on a spouse’s work project that’s causing stress.
- View Highlight
-

Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” - Daniel Kahneman.
- View Highlight
-

Google Scholar Effect: Scientific research depends on citing other research, and the research that gets cited the most is whatever shows up in the top results of Google Scholar searches, regardless of its contribution to the field.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Interesting! In what other ways do search engines create phenomena like this?]

Inversion: Avoiding problems can be more important than scoring wins.
- View Highlight
-

Principle of Least Effort: When seeking information, effort declines as soon as the minimum acceptable result is reached.
- View Highlight
-

Knightian Uncertainty: Risk that can’t be measured; admitting that you don’t know what you don’t know.
- View Highlight
-

Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.
- View Highlight
-

The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
- View Highlight
-

Ostrich Effect: Avoiding negative information that might challenge views that you desperately want to be right.
- View Highlight
-

Founder’s Syndrome: When a CEO is so emotionally invested in a company that they can’t effectively delegate decisions.
- View Highlight
-

In-Group Favoritism: Giving preference to people from your social group regardless of their objective qualifications.
- View Highlight
-

Bounded Rationality: People can’t be fully rational because your brain is a hormone machine, not an Excel spreadsheet.
- View Highlight
-

Meat Paradox: Dogs are family, pigs are food. Some animals classified as food are wrongly perceived to have lower intelligence than those classified as pets. An example of morality depending on utility.
- View Highlight
-

Fluency Heuristic: Ideas that can be explained simply are more likely to be believed than those that are complex, even if the simple-sounding ideas are nonsense. It occurs because ideas that are easy to grasp are hard to distinguish from ideas you’re familiar with.
- View Highlight
-

Historical Wisdom: “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Niall Ferguson
- View Highlight
-

Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.
- View Highlight
-

Emotional Contagion: One person’s emotions trigger the same emotions in other people, because evolution has selected for empathizing with those in your social group whose actions you rely on.
- View Highlight
-

Tribal Affiliation: Beliefs can be swayed by identity and a desire to fit in over rational analysis. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation.
- View Highlight
-

Emotional Competence: The ability to recognize others’ emotions and respond to them productively. Harder and rarer than it sounds.
- View Highlight
-

Base Rates: The success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try.
- View Highlight
-

Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try doesn’t apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do things differently than everyone else.
- View Highlight
-

Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::"1 death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
Didn't know there was a term for this!]

System Justification Theory: Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity.
- View Highlight
-

Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighborhood and you panic.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::"If 3 people say the job market is bad... is it really bad or are they just unlucky/bad, applying to jobs above their level, etc?"]

Buridan’s Ass: A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose. A form of decision paralysis.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::It's me! I'm the donkey! 😅]

Cumulative advantage: Social status snowballs in either direction because people like associating with successful people, so doors are opened for them, and avoid associating with unsuccessful people, for whom doors are closed.
- View Highlight
-

Anscombe’s Quartet: Four sets of numbers that look identical on paper (mean average, variance, correlation, etc.) but look completely different when graphed. Describes a situation where exact calculations don’t offer a good representation of how the world works.
- View Highlight
-

- View Highlight
-

Ringelmann Effect: Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.”
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Reminds me of social loafing]

False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how widely held your own beliefs are, caused by the difficulty of imagining the experiences of other people
- View Highlight
-
- [note::The opposite of pluralistic ignorance?]

Boomerang Effect: Trying to persuade someone to do one thing can make them more likely to do the opposite, because the act of persuasion can feel like someone stealing your freedom and doing the opposite makes you feel like you’re taking your freedom back.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::e.g. children rebelling]

Chronological Snobbery: “The assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also ‘a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.” – C.S. Lewis
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Out of Date/Fashion != Incorrect/Wrong]

Planck’s Principle: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
- View Highlight
-

McNamara Fallacy: A belief that rational decisions can be made with quantitative measures alone, when in fact the things you can’t measure are often the most consequential. Named after Defense Secretary McNamara, who tried to quantify every aspect of the Vietnam War.
- View Highlight
-

Courtesy Bias: Giving opinions that are likely to offend people the least, rather than what you actually believe.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::I have exhibited this countless times]

Group Attribution Error: Incorrectly assuming that the views of a group member reflect those of the whole group.
- View Highlight
-

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: Noticing an idea everywhere you look as soon as it’s brought to your attention in a way that makes you overestimate its prevalence.
- View Highlight
-

Normalcy Bias: Underestimating the odds of disaster because it’s comforting to assume things will keep functioning the way they’ve always functioned.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Every AI accelerationist ever]

Actor-Observer Asymmetry: We judge others based solely on their actions, but when judging ourselves we have an internal dialogue that justifies our mistakes and bad decisions.
- View Highlight
-

The 90-9-1 Rule: In social media networks, 90% of users just read content, 9% of users contribute a little content, and 1% of users contribute almost all the content. Gives a false impression of what ideas are popular or “average.”
- View Highlight
-

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Goals set retroactively after an activity, like shooting a blank wall and then drawing a bullseye around the holes you left, or picking a benchmark after you’ve invested.
- View Highlight
-

Poisoning the Well: Presenting irrelevant adverse information about someone in a way that makes everything else that person says seem untrustworthy. “Before you hear my opponent’s healthcare plan, let me remind you that he got a DUI in college.”
- View Highlight
-

Golem Effect: Performance declines when supervisors/teachers have low expectations of your abilities.
- View Highlight
-

Appeal to Consequences: Arguing that a hypothesis must be true (or false) because the outcome is something you like (or dislike). The classic example is arguing that climate change isn’t real because combating climate change will hurt the economy.
- View Highlight
-

Plain Folks Fallacy: People of authority acquiring trust by presenting themselves as Average Joe’s, when in fact their authority proves they are different from everyone else.
- View Highlight
-

Apophenia: A tendency to perceive correlations between unrelated things, because your mind can only deal with tiny sample sizes and assuming things are correlated creates easy/comforting explanations of how the world works.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Interesting! Is this why systems/complexity thinking is unintuitive?]

Self-Handicapping: Avoiding effort because you don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of that effort failing.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Oof... I think I do this a lot - not trying or not trying hard because if I fail I can say "well, I didn't care much anyway"]

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
- View Highlight
-

False Uniqueness Effect: Assuming your skills are unique when they’re not. Comes from conflating “I’m good at this” with “Others are bad at this.”
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Related: Dunning Kruger Effect]

Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.
- View Highlight
-

Non-Ergodic: When group probabilities don’t apply to singular events. If 100 people play Russian Roulette once, the odds of dying might be, say, 10%. But if one person plays Russian Roulette 100 times, the odds are dying are practically 100%.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Pollyanna Principle: It’s easier to remember happy memories than bad ones.
Declinism: Perpetually viewing society as in decline, because you’re afflicted by the Pollyanna Principle and you forget how much things sucked in the past.)
- View Highlight
-

Empathy Gap: Underestimating how you’ll behave when you’re “hot” (angry/aroused/rushed), caused by the inability to accurately foresee how your body’s physical response to situations (dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) will influence decision-making.
- View Highlight
-

Abilene Paradox: A group decides to do something that no one in the group wants to do because everyone mistakenly assumes they’re the only ones who object to the idea and they don’t want to rock the boat by speaking up.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::How does this differ from pluralistic ignorance?]

Hawthorne Effect: Being watched/studied changes how people behave, making it difficult to conduct social studies that accurately reflect the real world
- View Highlight
-

Weasel Words: Phrases that appear to have meaning but convey nothing tangible. “Growth was solid last quarter,” or “Many people believe.”
- View Highlight
-

Hormesis: Something that hurts you in a high dose can be good for you in small doses. (Weight on your bones, drinking red wine, etc.)
- View Highlight
-

Backfiring Effect: A supercharged version of confirmation bias where being presented with evidence that goes against your beliefs makes you double down on your initial beliefs because you feel you’re being attacked.
- View Highlight
-

Friendship Paradox: On average, people have fewer friends than their friends have. Occurs because people with an abnormally high number of friends are more likely to be one of your friends. It’s a fundamental part of social network dynamics and makes most people feel less popular than they are.
- View Highlight
-

Hedonic Treadmill: Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.
- View Highlight
-

Foundational Species: A single thing that plays an outsized role in supporting an ecosystem, whose loss would pull down many others with it. In nature: kelp, algae, and coral. In business: The Federal Reserve and Amazon.
- View Highlight
-

Bizarreness Effect: Crazy things are easier to remember than common things, providing a distorted sense of “normal.”
- View Highlight
-

Moderating Relationship: The correlation between two variables depends on a third, seemingly unrelated variable. The quality of a marriage may be dependent on a spouse’s work project that’s causing stress.
- View Highlight
-

Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” - Daniel Kahneman.
- View Highlight
-

Google Scholar Effect: Scientific research depends on citing other research, and the research that gets cited the most is whatever shows up in the top results of Google Scholar searches, regardless of its contribution to the field.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Interesting! In what other ways do search engines create phenomena like this?]

Inversion: Avoiding problems can be more important than scoring wins.
- View Highlight
-

Principle of Least Effort: When seeking information, effort declines as soon as the minimum acceptable result is reached.
- View Highlight
-

Knightian Uncertainty: Risk that can’t be measured; admitting that you don’t know what you don’t know.
- View Highlight
-

Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.
- View Highlight
-

The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
- View Highlight
-

Ostrich Effect: Avoiding negative information that might challenge views that you desperately want to be right.
- View Highlight
-

Founder’s Syndrome: When a CEO is so emotionally invested in a company that they can’t effectively delegate decisions.
- View Highlight
-

In-Group Favoritism: Giving preference to people from your social group regardless of their objective qualifications.
- View Highlight
-

Bounded Rationality: People can’t be fully rational because your brain is a hormone machine, not an Excel spreadsheet.
- View Highlight
-

Meat Paradox: Dogs are family, pigs are food. Some animals classified as food are wrongly perceived to have lower intelligence than those classified as pets. An example of morality depending on utility.
- View Highlight
-

Fluency Heuristic: Ideas that can be explained simply are more likely to be believed than those that are complex, even if the simple-sounding ideas are nonsense. It occurs because ideas that are easy to grasp are hard to distinguish from ideas you’re familiar with.
- View Highlight
-

Historical Wisdom: “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Niall Ferguson
- View Highlight
-

Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.
- View Highlight
-

Emotional Contagion: One person’s emotions trigger the same emotions in other people, because evolution has selected for empathizing with those in your social group whose actions you rely on.
- View Highlight
-

Tribal Affiliation: Beliefs can be swayed by identity and a desire to fit in over rational analysis. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation.
- View Highlight
-

Emotional Competence: The ability to recognize others’ emotions and respond to them productively. Harder and rarer than it sounds.
- View Highlight
-