You are not so smart / You can beat your brain Flashcards
Priming - you are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind. When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think it is called priming.
Priming works best on autopilot when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave.
You can choose to become an agent yourself. With just a smile and a thank-you, you can affect the way others feel.
You are most open to suggestion when your mental cruise control is on or when you find yourself in unfamiliar circumstances.
Confirmation bias - your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.
Punditry is an industry built on confirmation bias, providing fuel for beliefs, pundits pre-filter the world to match existing worldviews. You read them not for information, but for confirmation.
“Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things.”
By never seeking the antithetical (mutually incompatible) you can become so confident in your worldview that no one can dissuade you. In science, we move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform our opinions as well.
Thinking about thinking is the key. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should. Want never goes away.
Hindsight bias - you often look back on the things you’ve just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along. Hindsight bias is a close relative of the availability heuristic - the tendency to believe anecdotes and news stories are more representative of the big picture than they are. The availability heuristic shows you make decisions based on the information you have at hand.
Keep in mind the hindsight bias the next time you get into a debate - the other person really does think that he or she was never wrong.
The Texas sharpshooter fallacy - you tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. For many the world loses lustre (sheen / gloss) when you accept the idea that random mutations can lead to eyeballs or random burn patterns on toast can look like a person’s face. Any meaning is a human construct.
To admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder and random chance rules your life is a painful conceit.
Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife. Even though he knew fate didn’t put them together, it didn’t take away the wonder he felt when he was with her.
Procrastination - it is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking. It is a pervasive element of the human experience. You are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.
You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastic realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.
You must develop a strategy for outmanoeuvring your own weakness. The trick is to accept that the NOW-you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the FUTURE-you - a person who cannot be trusted. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.
Productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul.
Introspection illusion - believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes is an illusion. The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you.
The availability heuristic - you are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before. Politicians use this all the time, by hoping an anecdote will sway your opinion. We all don’t think in statistics, we think in examples, in stories.
The Bystander Effect - the more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help.
Apophenia - any meaning derived from coincidences comes from your mind.
Brand loyalty - you prefer the things you own because you rationalise your past choices to protect your sense of self.
Sunk cost fallacy - when you’ve spent money on something you don’t want to own or do, but feel like you should.
The argument from authority (halo bias) - the status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual’s message.
You would be wise to come to your own conclusions based on the evidence, not the people delivering it.
The argument from ignorance - when you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.
The straw man fallacy - in any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent’s position.
You sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easter to refute, argue and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending. This is a straw man.
The Ad Hominem fallacy - What someone says and why they say it should be judged separately. Do not dismiss the other person’s argument by attacking the person instead of the claim. Guilt by association is often the ad hominem fallacy at work.
You might be a great judge of character, but you need to be a great judge of evidence to avoid delusion.
The Just-World fallacy - the beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.
If you look to the downtrodden and wonder why they can’t pull themselves out of poverty and get a nice job like you, you are committing the just-world fallacy. You are ignoring the unearned blessings of your station.
Subjective validation - a fancy way of saying that you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you.
Cultivating an incomparable self either through consumption or creation is not something you take lightly. Yet somewhere between nature and nurture, we are all far more similar than we think. Genetically, you and your friends are almost identical.
Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward.
Groupthink - the desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress.
Selling Out - both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status. This is the turbine of capitalism.
People now define their personalities by how good their taste is, or how clever, or how obscure, or how ironic their choices are. You compete with your peers by one-upping them. You attain status by having better taste in movies and music, by owning more authentic furniture and clothing. You reveal your unique character through your consumption habits.
Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They try to out-taste one another.
Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.
Self-serving bias - you excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.
Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation.
The tendency, which springs from the self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.
You are incredibly egocentric just like everyone else.
The spotlight effect - people devote little attention to you unless prompted to. This is because everyone is just as egocentric as you are.
Venting makes matters worse and primes your future behaviour by fogging your mind. It’s an emotional hamster wheel. It will not dissipate the negative energy and leads to aggressive behaviour over time.
The misinformation effect - memories are not played back like recordings. Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.
Memory is imperfect, but also constantly changing. Not only do you filter your past through your present, but your memory is easily infected by social contagion. Memory very easily gets tainted.
Considering the misinformation effect not only requires you to be skeptical of eyewitness testimony and your own history, but it also means you can be more forgiving when someone is certain of something that is later revealed to be embellished or even complete fiction.
Conformity - it takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct/mechanism. But it can lead to dark places. Never be afraid to question authority.
Social loafing - once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled together with others.
Learned helplessness - if you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in. You must fight back your behaviour and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable. Don’t give in yet.
The anchoring effect - your first perception lingers in your mind affecting later perceptions and decisions. Always ask yourself, are old anchors controlling your current decisions?
Self-handicapping - you often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego. These behaviours are investments in a future reality in which you can blame your failure on something other than your ability.
There is a serious imbalance between the time you spend creating memories and the time you spend enjoying them later - the experiencing self and the remembering self. The remembering self doesn’t like not having the opportunity to build new memories, so it is willing to grind away to earn money or food and shelter and delay gratification. Grind away to have money for later, but do so in a way that generates happiness as you work.
Consistency bias is part of your overall desire to reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, the emotions you feel when noticing that you are of 2 minds on one issue.
Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.
The illusion of control - you can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. Seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness.
The fundamental attribution error - other people’s behaviour is more the result of the situation than their disposition.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed. This creates a double burden.
A negative outlook will lead to negative predictions, and you will start to unconsciously manipulate your environment to deliver those predictions.
Some people stake their whole identity on their acts. Their egocentricity means they cannot risk a failure because it’s a devastating blow to their ego.
