Knowledge Flashcards
Hanlon’s razor
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.” (related: fundamental attribution error — “ the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the agent (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining another person’s behavior in a given situation.”)
Occam’s Razor
“Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”
Cognitive Biases
“Tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgments.”
Systems Thinking
“By taking the overall system as well as its parts into account systems thinking is designed to avoid potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences.”
Scenario Analysis
“A process of analyzing possible future events by considering alternative possible outcomes.”
Power-law
“A functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another.” (related: Pareto distribution; Pareto principle — “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”
Normal (or Gaussian) distribution
“A very common continuous probability distribution…Physical quantities that are expected to be the sum of many independent processes (such as measurement errors) often have distributions that are nearly normal.”
Simulation
“The imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.”
Lateral Thinking
“Solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic.”
Divergent Thinking vs Convergent Thinking
“Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It is often used in conjunction with its cognitive opposite, convergent thinking, which follows a particular set of logical steps to arrive at one solution, which in some cases is a ‘correct’ solution.”
Critical Mass
“The smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.” “In social dynamics, critical mass is a sufficient number of adopters of an innovation in a social system so that the rate of adoption becomes self-sustaining and creates further growth.”
Activation energy
“The minimum energy which must be available to a chemical system with potential reactants to result in a chemical reaction.”
Catalyst
“A substance which increases the rate of a chemical reaction.”
Leverage
“The force amplification achieved by using a tool, mechanical device or machine system.”
Crowdsourcing
“The process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially an online community, rather than from employees or suppliers.” (related: wisdom of the crowd — “a large group’s aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group.”, collective intelligence).
Scientific Method
“Systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” (related: reproducibility)
Proxy
“A variable that is not in itself directly relevant, but that serves in place of an unobservable or immeasurable variable. In order for a variable to be a good proxy, it must have a close correlation, not necessarily linear, with the variable of interest.” (related: revealed preference)
Selection Bias
“The selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.” (related: sampling bias)
Observer Effect
“Changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed.” (related: Schrödinger’s cat)
Survivorship Bias
“The logical error of concentrating on the people or things that ‘survived’ some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility.”
False Positives and False Negatives
“A false positive error, or in short false positive, commonly called a ‘false alarm’, is a result that indicates a given condition has been fulfilled, when it actually has not been fulfilled…A false negative error, or in short false negative, is where a test result indicates that a condition failed, while it actually was successful, i.e. erroneously no effect has been assumed.”
Bayes’ Theorem
“Describes the probability of an event, based on conditions that might be related to the event. For example, suppose one is interested in whether a person has cancer, and knows the person’s age. If cancer is related to age, then, using Bayes’ theorem, information about the person’s age can be used to more accurately assess the probability that they have cancer.” (related: base rate fallacy)
Regression to the Mean
“The phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on its second measurement.”
Simpson’s Paradox
“A paradox in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.”
Opportunity Cost
“The value of the best alternative forgone where, given limited resources, a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives. Assuming the best choice is made, it is the ‘cost’ incurred by not enjoying the benefit that would have been had by taking the second best available choice.”
Intuition
Personal experience coded into your personal neural network, which means your intuition is dangerous outside the bounds of your personal experience.
Local vs Global Optimum
“A local optimum of an optimization problem is a solution that is optimal (either maximal or minimal) within a neighboring set of candidate solutions. This is in contrast to a global optimum, which is the optimal solution among all possible solutions, not just those in a particular neighborhood of values.”
Decision Trees
“A decision support tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility.” (related: expected value)
Availability Bias
“People tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.”
Confirmation Bias
“The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.” (related: cognitive dissonance)
Loss Aversion
“People’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.”
Anecdotal
“Using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of a sound argument or compelling evidence.”
False Cause
“Presuming that a real or perceived relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other.” (related: correlation does not imply causation)
Straw Man
“Giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent.”
Plausible
Thinking that just because something is plausible means that it is true.
Likely
Thinking that just because something is possible means that it is likely.
Appeal to Emotion
“Manipulating an emotional response in place of a valid or compelling argument.”
Ad Hominem
“Attacking your opponent’s character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument.”
Slippery Slope
“Asserting that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.”
Black or White
“When two alternative states are presented as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist.”
Bandwagon
“Appealing to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.”
