| Note | Description | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [[notes/Amara's law.md\|Amara's law]] | The tendency to overestimate the progress of a technology in the near-term and and underestimate it in the long-term. | | [[notes/Analysis paralysis.md\|Analysis paralysis]] | The state of overthinking or overanalyzing a situation to the point that a decision or action is never taken. | | [[notes/Apophenia.md\|Apophenia]] | The human tendency to perceive patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. | | [[notes/Attritional pessimism.md\|Attritional pessimism]] | The tendency to decreasingly hope for good things and increasingly hope to avoid bad things. | | [[notes/Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.md\|Baader-Meinhof phenomenon]] | A cognitive bias where, after seeing something new, you start seeing it everywhere. | | [[notes/Betteridge's law.md\|Betteridge's law]] | The observation that most headlines that end in a question mark can be answered by the word no. | | [[notes/Biochauvinism.md\|Biochauvinism]] | A belief that biological life has intrinsic superiority over artificial or synthetic life forms. | | [[notes/Brandolini's law.md\|Brandolini's law]] | The observation that the effort required to refute nonsense is much greater than that needed to produce it. | | [[notes/Carbon fascism.md\|Carbon fascism]] | Only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value. | | [[notes/Chesterton's fence.md\|Chesterton's fence]] | The idea that reforms should not remove existing structures without understanding why they were established in the first place. | | [[notes/Chronocentrism.md\|Chronocentrism]] | The belief that one’s own time period is more important or advanced than past or future eras. | | [[notes/Chronological snobbery.md\|Chronological snobbery]] | The irrational belief that newer ideas are inherently superior to older ones. | | [[notes/Cognitive dissonance.md\|Cognitive dissonance]] | The psychological discomfort experienced when holding two conflicting beliefs or behaviors, often resolved by adjusting beliefs. | | [[notes/Collector’s fallacy.md\|Collector’s fallacy]] | The tendency to accumulate information without synthesizing or using it. | | [[notes/Curse of knowledge.md\|Curse of knowledge]] | A cognitive bias where experts struggle to imagine what it is like not to know something, hindering effective communication. | | [[notes/Declinism.md\|Declinism]] | The belief that society or civilisation is in decline, often romanticising the past and fearing the future. | | [[notes/Dollar auction.md\|Dollar auction]] | An auction game showing escalation of commitment, where bidders spend more than an item's value to avoid losing prior bids. | | [[notes/Dunning-Kruger effect.md\|Dunning-Kruger effect]] | A cognitive bias where people with low ability overestimate their competence while experts underestimate theirs. | | [[notes/Easterlin paradox.md\|Easterlin paradox]] | The observation that beyond a certain income level, increases in average income do not necessarily increase average happiness. | | [[notes/Egg of Columbus.md\|Egg of Columbus]] | A parable showing how a problem seems simple or obvious after someone has shown how to solve it. | | [[notes/Einstellung effect.md\|Einstellung effect]] | The tendency to solve problems using familiar methods even when better solutions exist. | | [[notes/Emotive conjugation.md\|Emotive conjugation]] | The phenomenon where different words or phrases with similar denotations evoke different emotional reactions due to connotation. | | [[notes/Exponential growth bias.md\|Exponential growth bias]] | The tendency to underestimate exponential growth and focus on linear trends when forecasting. | | [[notes/Externality neglect.md\|Externality neglect]] | The failure to account for indirect effects of an action on third parties, leading to suboptimal decisions. | | [[notes/Gell-Mann effect.md\|Gell-Mann effect]] | The observation that newspapers often misreport topics we know about, implying they likely misreport other topics too. | | [[notes/Gish gallop.md\|Gish gallop]] | A rhetorical technique that overwhelms opponents with a rapid series of arguments, making it hard to refute each point. | | [[notes/Hawthorne effect.md\|Hawthorne effect]] | The phenomenon where people alter their behaviour because they know they are being observed. | | [[notes/Hindsight bias.md\|Hindsight bias]] | The tendency to see events as having been predictable after they have already occurred. | | [[notes/Historian's fallacy.md\|Historian's fallacy]] | The error of judging past decisions by using current knowledge rather than the information available at the time. | | [[notes/Hofstadter's law.md\|Hofstadter's law]] | The observation that tasks always take longer than expected, even when accounting for Hofstadter’s law itself. | | [[notes/Hyperbolic discounting.md\|Hyperbolic discounting]] | The tendency to prefer smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later ones, with discount rates declining over time. | | [[notes/Igon value problem.md\|Igon value problem]] | Situations where experts draw sweeping conclusions from small or dubious data sets, misusing statistics. | | [[notes/IKEA effect.md\|IKEA effect]] | The cognitive bias where people value things they have partly created more than equivalent items made by others. | | [[notes/Immunity to Change.md\|Immunity to Change]] | A personal development framework that uncovers hidden competing commitments that block desired behavioural change. | | [[notes/Just-world fallacy.md\|Just-world fallacy]] | The cognitive bias that assumes people get what they deserve and deserve what they get, leading to victim‑blaming. | | [[notes/Lake Wobegon effect.md\|Lake Wobegon effect]] | The human tendency to overestimate one’s abilities relative to others, where everyone thinks they are above average. | | [[notes/Law of the instrument.md\|Law of the instrument]] | The bias of overreliance on a familiar tool, expressed as ‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. | | [[notes/Mean world syndrome.md\|Mean world syndrome]] | The belief that the world is more dangerous than it actually is, often fueled by media consumption. | | [[notes/Meat paradox.md\|Meat paradox]] | The paradox of caring for animals and yet eating them. | | [[notes/Naïve realism.md\|Naïve realism]] | The belief that we perceive the world as it truly is, without interpreting or constructing our perceptions. | | [[notes/Parable of the turkey.md\|Parable of the turkey]] | An illustrative failure in inductive reasoning: a turkey fed daily assumes it will always be fed until it is slaughtered. | | [[notes/Penny-doubling riddle.md\|Penny-doubling riddle]] | A thought experiment where a penny doubled daily for a month results in a surprisingly large sum. | | [[notes/Preference falsification.md\|Preference falsification]] | The act of misrepresenting one’s true preferences in public due to social pressure or fear of repercussions. | | [[notes/Preparedness paradox.md\|Preparedness paradox]] | The situation where effective precautionary measures lead to scepticism or complacency because disaster is averted. | | [[notes/Presentism.md\|Presentism]] | The anachronistic application of present-day perspectives and values to interpret past events. | | [[notes/Pygmalion effect.md\|Pygmalion effect]] | The self-fulfilling phenomenon where higher expectations lead to improved performance. | | [[notes/Rosy retrospection.md\|Rosy retrospection]] | The tendency to remember past events more fondly than they were experienced at the time. | | [[notes/Serial position-negativity effect.md\|Serial position-negativity effect]] | The tendency to better recall items at the beginning and end of a list than those in the middle. | | [[notes/Temporal parochialism.md\|Temporal parochialism]] | The assumption that the concerns and values of the present time are universally important across all times. | | [[notes/Ultracrepidarianism.md\|Ultracrepidarianism]] | The habit of giving opinions and advice on subjects outside one’s knowledge or expertise. | | [[notes/Vitalism.md\|Vitalism]] | The discredited doctrine that living organisms are different from non‑living entities because of a non-physical vital force. | | [[notes/Wheat-and-chessboard problem.md\|Wheat-and-chessboard problem]] | A mathematical exercise illustrating exponential growth by doubling grains of wheat on each square of a chessboard. |