(highlight:: Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes.
He said:

Inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance, ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, and aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.)
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Incentives can tempt good people to push the boundaries farther than they’d ever imagine. Financial boundaries, moral boundaries, all of them. It’s hard to know what you’ll consider doing until someone dangles a huge reward in your face, and underestimating how adjustable the boundaries can become when rewards rise is a leading cause of terrible decisions.
- View Highlight
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- [note::"Adjustable morality"]

Ignoring or underestimating the full range of potential consequences, especially tail events that seem rare but have catastrophic effects. The most comfortable way to think about risk is to imagine a range of potential consequences that don’t seem like a big deal. Then you feel responsible, like you’re paying attention to risk, but in a way that lets you remain 100% confident and optimistic. The problem with low-probability tail risks is that they’re so rare you can get away with ignoring them 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time they change your life.
- View Highlight
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- [note::Hadn't thought about risk mitigation in the context of "how comfortable it is it think about X risk"]

Lots of little errors compound into something huge. And the power compounding is never intuitive. So it’s hard to see how being a little bit of an occasional jerk grows into a completely poisoned work culture. Or how a handful of small lapses, none of which seem bad on their own, ruins your reputation. The Great Depression happened because a bunch of things that weren’t surprising (a stock crash, a banking panic, a bad farm year) occurred at the same time and fed on each other until they grew into a catastrophe. It’s easy to ignore small mistakes, and even easier to miss how they morph into huge ones. So huge ones are what we get.
- View Highlight
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Underestimating adaptation, both present and future, leaving you convinced that history will repeat itself and bitter when it doesn’t. A lot of regrettable pessimism happens when you find a bad thing and assume it’ll stay bad forever. But things change. People adapt and figure out better ways. Same thing in the other direction: nothing too good stays that way for long because it breeds complacency and catches competitors’ attention.
- View Highlight
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Being influenced by the actions of people who are playing a different game than you are. The idea that advice can be good for one person and terrible for another is rarely obvious. Taking your cues and advice from people with different goals, abilities, and desires than you is an easy road to misery. But it’s common, because smart people you look up to tell you it’s good advice.
- View Highlight
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Having a little past success is the enemy of beginner’s mind, because doing well reduces the incentive to explore other ideas, especially when those ideas conflict with your proven strategy. Jason Zweig puts it: “Being right is the enemy of staying right because it leads you to forget the way the world works.”
- View Highlight
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Wrongly assuming that the information you have at your disposal tells a complete picture of what you’re dealing with. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara demanded everything about the Vietnam war be measured. He was obsessed with statistics. One day McNamara was going through his data when head of special operations Edward Lansdale interrupted and said “there’s something missing here.” McNamara asked what it was. “The feelings of the Vietnamese people. You can’t reduce that to a statistic,” Lansdale said. But it mattered more than anything. That realization applies to many fields.
- View Highlight
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Misreading the cause of others’ successes or failures in a way that tempts you to overemphasize parts of their strategy when attempting to copy what they did. Part of this is because most people don’t (and can’t) know exactly what caused their own successes and failures. So even if you ask them for a roadmap, they might lead you down a different path than the one they took themselves. This is especially true because people like good, clean, easy stories about cause and effect, meaning the story you get might be totally different from the complex set of circumstances that caused an outcome you’re trying to copy or avoid.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes.
He said:

Inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance, ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, and aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.)
- View Highlight
-

Incentives can tempt good people to push the boundaries farther than they’d ever imagine. Financial boundaries, moral boundaries, all of them. It’s hard to know what you’ll consider doing until someone dangles a huge reward in your face, and underestimating how adjustable the boundaries can become when rewards rise is a leading cause of terrible decisions.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::"Adjustable morality"]

Ignoring or underestimating the full range of potential consequences, especially tail events that seem rare but have catastrophic effects. The most comfortable way to think about risk is to imagine a range of potential consequences that don’t seem like a big deal. Then you feel responsible, like you’re paying attention to risk, but in a way that lets you remain 100% confident and optimistic. The problem with low-probability tail risks is that they’re so rare you can get away with ignoring them 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time they change your life.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Hadn't thought about risk mitigation in the context of "how comfortable it is it think about X risk"]

Lots of little errors compound into something huge. And the power compounding is never intuitive. So it’s hard to see how being a little bit of an occasional jerk grows into a completely poisoned work culture. Or how a handful of small lapses, none of which seem bad on their own, ruins your reputation. The Great Depression happened because a bunch of things that weren’t surprising (a stock crash, a banking panic, a bad farm year) occurred at the same time and fed on each other until they grew into a catastrophe. It’s easy to ignore small mistakes, and even easier to miss how they morph into huge ones. So huge ones are what we get.
- View Highlight
-

Underestimating adaptation, both present and future, leaving you convinced that history will repeat itself and bitter when it doesn’t. A lot of regrettable pessimism happens when you find a bad thing and assume it’ll stay bad forever. But things change. People adapt and figure out better ways. Same thing in the other direction: nothing too good stays that way for long because it breeds complacency and catches competitors’ attention.
- View Highlight
-

Being influenced by the actions of people who are playing a different game than you are. The idea that advice can be good for one person and terrible for another is rarely obvious. Taking your cues and advice from people with different goals, abilities, and desires than you is an easy road to misery. But it’s common, because smart people you look up to tell you it’s good advice.
- View Highlight
-

Having a little past success is the enemy of beginner’s mind, because doing well reduces the incentive to explore other ideas, especially when those ideas conflict with your proven strategy. Jason Zweig puts it: “Being right is the enemy of staying right because it leads you to forget the way the world works.”
- View Highlight
-

Wrongly assuming that the information you have at your disposal tells a complete picture of what you’re dealing with. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara demanded everything about the Vietnam war be measured. He was obsessed with statistics. One day McNamara was going through his data when head of special operations Edward Lansdale interrupted and said “there’s something missing here.” McNamara asked what it was. “The feelings of the Vietnamese people. You can’t reduce that to a statistic,” Lansdale said. But it mattered more than anything. That realization applies to many fields.
- View Highlight
-

Misreading the cause of others’ successes or failures in a way that tempts you to overemphasize parts of their strategy when attempting to copy what they did. Part of this is because most people don’t (and can’t) know exactly what caused their own successes and failures. So even if you ask them for a roadmap, they might lead you down a different path than the one they took themselves. This is especially true because people like good, clean, easy stories about cause and effect, meaning the story you get might be totally different from the complex set of circumstances that caused an outcome you’re trying to copy or avoid.
- View Highlight
-