1) Next Tuesday: Before a purchase, take the time to consider what you’ll be doing, from morning to night, this coming Tuesday. How will this purchase affect you on Tuesday? This simple exercise—thinking about time used on a specific day (you…
We have the tendency to overestimate the degree to which others agree with us; therein making this—tendency—just another of those predictable patterns of thought and behavior that lead us to draw incorrect conclusions. Psychologists call this the False Consensus Bias. Let me ask you: “Is agreeing…
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. Some things are fragile—they don’t like chaos, while others are robust—they don’t care if things are crazy. Antifragility is beyond…
We sometimes tend to think that ideas and feelings arising from our intuition are essentially superior to those achieved by reason and logic. As such, intuition—the good old “gut feeling”—has come to be idealized as the Noble Savage of the mind, fearlessly cutting through…
… the Framing Bias. This is another beautiful mental shortcut that we use to solve common problems. Although this heuristic speeds up processing in our brain, it occasionally makes us think so fast that we miss what is important. When heuristics work, they…
Have you ever been convinced that you could predict how well you would perform in any stock market situation? If the answer is yes, then you are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. What that effect literally means is that you are so bad at a…
A first on my blog! I am re-publishing an article, just because it is such an outstanding piece of work containing so much, more or less, obvious truths: What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should…
In my earlier blog post, I asked which animal kills more people? Despite that the Hippopotamus emerged victorious; in truth, the animal that creates by far the greatest havoc to humankind is the Black Swan. How so? Because the most influential and devastating events in history…
Let’s talk about Habituation. Habituation is really just another trick that our inner con man plays on us: He makes us believe that wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, and that their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. “Psychologists call this effect habituation,…
Which animal kills more humans per year? Sharks or Hippopotamuses? And the winner is … …the river horse, a.k.a. Hippopotamus, with a tally of 500 to 2,900 lives per year. These beauties weigh about 8,000 pounds each and are capable of darting at 18 miles…