Predicting the Future with Bayes’ Theorem
In episode #37 of The Knowledge Project, we talked with professional poker player Annie Duke about thinking in probabilities, something good poker players do all the time. At the poker table or in …
Availability Bias
The Availability Bias: How to Overcome a Common Cognitive Distortion
“The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character, and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, …
Stop Preparing For The Last Disaster
When something goes wrong, we often strive to be better prepared if the same thing happens again. But the same disasters tend not to happen twice in a row. A more effective approach is simply to …
The Art of Thinking Clearly
Rolf Dobelli’s book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, is a compendium of systematic errors in decision making. While the list of fallacies is not complete, it’s a great launching pad into the …
The evolutionary roots of human behaviour
Anthony Gottlieb writing in the New Yorker: Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from …
The Noise Bottleneck: When More Information is Harmful
When consuming information, we strive for more signal and less noise. The problem is a cognitive illusion: we feel like the more information we consume the more signal we receive. While this is …
Why First Impressions Don’t Matter Much For Experiences
We all know first impressions matter. We’ve all been told to be extra careful about how we come across in the initial seconds of a job interview or a first date. So we sweat over handshakes and shirt …
How Infomercials Persuade
In response to But Wait … There’s More, a kind reader passed along a link to a wonderful interview between Andrew Warner and Tim Hawthorne (a producer of infomercials). On how to …
An Incredible Offer — But Wait…There’s More
You’ll never look at infomercials the same after reading this post. Robert Cialdini calls But Wait…There’s More “A wholly fascinating account of a wholly fascinating …
Two Questions Everyone Asks Themselves When They Meet You
People everywhere differentiate each other by liking (warmth, trustworthiness) and by respecting (competence, efficiency). Essentially they ask themselves: (1) Is this person warm? and (2) Is this …
The Planning Fallacy
David Books, author of The Social Animal, with an excellent column on the planning fallacy: In his forthcoming book (now released), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy. …
3 Things Everyone Should Know About the Availability Heuristic
There are 3 things you should know about the availability heuristic: We often misjudge the frequency and magnitude of events that have happened recently. This happens, in part, because of the …
Is Everything Obvious Once You Know The Answer?
We often think we can rely on common sense. But in a complex world, common sense is not always sufficient. *** Duncan Watts new book Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer explores the limit …
Future Babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway
Future Babble has come out to mixed reviews. I think the book would interest anyone seeking wisdom. Here are some of my notes: First a little background: Predictions fail because the world is too …
A Simple Checklist to Improve Decisions
We owe thanks to the publishing industry. Their ability to take a concept and fill an entire category with a shotgun approach is the reason that more people are talking about biases. Unfortunately, …
Predicting the Improbable
One natural human bias is that we tend to draw strong conclusions based on few observations. This bias, misconceptions of chance, shows itself in many ways including the gambler and hot hand …