Concepts (page 39)

  • The Illusion of Validity

    Confidence in a judgment that tracks how coherent the evidence looks rather than how much of it there is. The phrase reaches this site through the online ratings literature.

  • The Indistractable Model

    The Indistractable Model is Nir Eyal's four-part structure for resisting distraction, set out in Indistractable in 2019: master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external…

  • The Inside View and the Outside View

    Two ways of forecasting the same thing. The inside view builds the forecast out of the specifics of the case in front of you. The outside view ignores the specifics, treats the case as one instance…

  • The Intelligence Quotient

    In 1912 the German psychologist William Stern proposed dividing mental age by chronological age rather than subtracting one from the other, which is what Alfred Binet had done. Lewis Terman, at…

  • The Intensity Formula

    The intensity formula is Cal Newport's stated law of productivity in Deep Work in 2016, set at page 40: high-quality work produced equals time spent multiplied by intensity of focus. It is presented…

  • The Interpretive Claim

    An interpretive claim is a claim about what a set of agreed facts means, and in particular a claim about somebody's intent. It is not a research finding and it is not a finding of any other kind. It…

  • The Jingle-Jangle Fallacy

    The jingle-jangle fallacy names two errors that share a shape. Jingle is assuming that two measures carrying the same name are measuring the same thing. Jangle is assuming that two nearly identical…

  • The Law of Small Numbers

    The law of small numbers is the mistaken intuition that a small sample resembles the population it was drawn from. There is a real law of large numbers, which says that large samples converge on the…

  • The Linear Mind

    The linear mind is Nicholas Carr's name for the mode of thought he attributes to five centuries of print: sustained, sequential, able to follow a long argument to its end. He credits it with the…

  • The Lipstick Effect

    The lipstick effect is the claim that spending on beauty products, and on lipstick in particular, rises during recessions, because a small cosmetic purchase is the affordable substitute for the…

  • The Mad Genius Myth

    The mad genius myth is the popular belief that creativity and mental illness are linked, so that exceptional originality comes bundled with instability. The honest verdict is neither myth nor link…

  • The Manipulation Matrix

    The Manipulation Matrix is Nir Eyal's two-by-two test for whether a product is ethical to build. One axis asks whether it materially improves the user's life. The other asks whether the maker would…