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…
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,…
The tendency to find order to ambiguous stimuli is built into the cognitive machinery we use to understand the world. That predisposition to impose order can be so automatic and so unchecked that we often end up believing in the…
Wall Street Analysts are bad at stock picking: Analysis of all sell and buy recommendations in 2003 showed that the portfolio with negatively viewed stocks gained 53.5% (over two years), more than 75 percentage points better than the market. Investing, contrary…
We let confirmation bias take control of our mind by only seeking out information from sources that agree with our pre-existing beliefs. Conversely, we tend to ignore and dismiss information (= disconfirming evidence) which tend to disprove our initial impressions. It’s the tendency to interpret the glass…
When it comes to mathematical functions, the human brain can easily comprehend “Linear Function or Simple Interest”, but we are genetically unfit to comprehend “Exponential Function or Compound Interest” and its massive impact years down the road. When it comes to interest…
Irrationally wanting things to stay the same, also called inertia. We do this in part because we want to avoid costs, even when they’re offset by a larger gain, a process psychologists call “Loss aversion”. You hold onto a mutual fund…