Knowledge

Question 1

Hanlon’s razor

Answer 1

“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.”)

Question 2

Occam’s Razor 

Answer 2

“Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”

Question 3

Cognitive Biases

Answer 3

“Tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgments.”

Question 4

Systems Thinking 

Answer 4

“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.”

Question 5

Scenario Analysis

Answer 5

“A process of analyzing possible future events by considering alternative possible outcomes.”

Question 6

Power-law

Answer 6

“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.”

Question 7

Normal (or Gaussian) distribution

Answer 7

“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.”

Question 8

Simulation

Answer 8

“The imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.”

Question 9

Lateral Thinking

Answer 9

“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.”

Question 10

Divergent Thinking vs Convergent Thinking 

Answer 10

“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.”

Question 11

Critical Mass 

Answer 11

“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.”

Question 12

Activation energy

Answer 12

 “The minimum energy which must be available to a chemical system with potential reactants to result in a chemical reaction.”

Question 13

Catalyst

Answer 13

“A substance which increases the rate of a chemical reaction.”

Question 14

Leverage 

Answer 14

“The force amplification achieved by using a tool, mechanical device or machine system.”

Question 15

Crowdsourcing

Answer 15

“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).

Question 16

Scientific Method

Answer 16

“Systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” (related: reproducibility)

Question 17

Proxy 

Answer 17

“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)

Question 18

Selection Bias 

Answer 18

“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)

Question 19

Observer Effect 

Answer 19

“Changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed.” (related: Schrödinger’s cat)

Question 20

Survivorship Bias 

Answer 20

“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.”

Question 21

False Positives and False Negatives

Answer 21

“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.”

Question 22

Bayes’ Theorem 

Answer 22

 “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)

Question 23

Regression to the Mean 

Answer 23

“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.”

Question 24

Simpson’s Paradox 

Answer 24

“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.”

Question 25

Opportunity Cost

Answer 25

“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.”

Question 26

Intuition

Answer 26

Personal experience coded into your personal neural network, which means your intuition is dangerous outside the bounds of your personal experience.

Question 27

Local vs Global Optimum 

Answer 27

“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.”

Question 28

Decision Trees

Answer 28

 “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)

Question 29

Availability Bias

Answer 29

“People tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.”

Question 30

Confirmation Bias

Answer 30

“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)

Question 31

Loss Aversion 

Answer 31

“People’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.”

Question 32

Anecdotal

Answer 32

“Using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of a sound argument or compelling evidence.”

Question 33

False Cause 

Answer 33

“Presuming that a real or perceived relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other.” (related: correlation does not imply causation)

Question 34

Straw Man

Answer 34

“Giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent.”

Question 35

Plausible

Answer 35

Thinking that just because something is plausible means that it is true.

Question 36

Likely

Answer 36

Thinking that just because something is possible means that it is likely.

Question 37

Appeal to Emotion

Answer 37

“Manipulating an emotional response in place of a valid or compelling argument.”

Question 38

Ad Hominem

Answer 38

“Attacking your opponent’s character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument.”

Question 39

Slippery Slope

Answer 39

 “Asserting that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.”

Question 40

Black or White 

Answer 40

“When two alternative states are presented as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist.”

Question 41

Bandwagon

Answer 41

“Appealing to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.”