100 Little Ideas | Collaborative Fund

toomanysusans

Jun 1

ideas

A list of ideas and thought-provoking concepts, by Morgan Housel (@morganhousel)

Depressive Realism: Depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they're more realistic about how risky and fragile life is. The opposite of "blissfully unaware."
Skill Compensation: People who are exceptionally good at one thing tend to be exceptionally poor at another.
Curse of Knowledge: The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you're talking about.
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.
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.
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.
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 neighbourhood, 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 neighbourhood and you panic.
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.
Pareto Principle: The majority of outcomes are driven by a minority of events.
Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." The obvious inverse of the Pareto Principle, but hard to accept in practice.
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.
Impostor Syndrome: Fear of being exposed as less talented than people think you are, often because talent is owed to cumulative advantage rather than actual effort or skill.
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."
Semmelweis Reflex: Automatically rejecting evidence that contradicts your tribe's established norms. Named after a Hungarian doctor who discovered that patients treated by doctors who wash their hands suffer fewer infections, but struggled to convince other doctors that his finding was true.
False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how widely held your own beliefs are, caused by the difficulty of imagining the experiences of other people.
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.
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
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.
Courtesy Bias: Giving opinions that are likely to offend people the least, rather than what you actually believe.
Berkson's Paradox: Strong correlations can fall apart when combined with a larger population. Among hospital patients, motorcycle crash victims wearing helmets are more likely to be seriously injured than those not wearing helmets. But that's because most crash victims saved by helmets did not need to become hospital patients, and those without helmets are more likely to die before becoming a hospital patient.