(INCOMPLETE)
The human mind is powerful and flexible thanks in part to heuristics, “approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.” Unfortunately this is also the source of many of society’s ills. The following things are likely to be important, and I plan to expand upon them as I am able:
- Forer Effect
- Duning-Kruger Effect
- Confirmation Bias
- Loss aversion
- Fundamental Attribution Error
- Colonoscopy Pain Study
- Fixed/Variable Ratio Rewards
- Satsifaction of Search (Ambulance sirens/crashes)
- Pareidolia (and its strange inverse, prosopagnosia)
- Kuhn’s Paradigm Shift & the 4-minute-mile
- Automaticity
- From Wikipedia: In Influence, Robert Cialdini [describes an experiment] which illustrates how compliant people will be with a request if they hear words that sound like they are being given a reason, even if no actual reason is provided. The experimenters approached people standing in line to use a photocopier with one of three requests:
- “Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?”
- “Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” or
- “Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”
- When given the request plus a reason, 94% of people asked complied with the request. When given the request without a reason, only 60% complied. But when given the request with what sounds like a reason but isn’t, compliance jumped back to 93%. Langer, Chanowitz, and Blank are convinced that most human behavior falls into automatic response patterns.”
- From Wikipedia: In Influence, Robert Cialdini [describes an experiment] which illustrates how compliant people will be with a request if they hear words that sound like they are being given a reason, even if no actual reason is provided. The experimenters approached people standing in line to use a photocopier with one of three requests:
Something about the mind, wired to find patterns both real and imaginary, rebels at the notion of fundamental disorder.
George Johnson, Fire in the Mind
Humans seem to be fundamentally bad at intuitively grasping the outcomes of complex systems, especially those involving emergent properties, i.e. simple rules whose interactions involve feedback loops and recursion that can drastically amplify small changes in inputs. We are poor at both sides of the equation — missing patterns that should be apparent, and imagining patterns that do not exist.
- Black Swans
Towards a more accurate model of the world
- Logical Positivism
- Felicific Calculus
- Micromort
- Akrasia
Theory-of-mind
- Umwelt and Umgebung
- Ghost in the Machine
Oddities
- Semantic Satiety
- Dunbar’s number
- Hofstader’s Law states “It will always take longer than you plan to do something, even when you take Hofstader’s Law into account.”