Concepts (page 70)

Survivorship bias is reasoning from the cases that made it, because those are the only ones still visible. The failures left no trace, so the pattern found among the winners looks like a cause when…

Switch cost is what moving attention between tasks charges you, and the charge is not the interruption's length but the reorientation on either side of it. The evidence our notes rest on is Foerde…

System noise is unwanted variability in judgements that should ideally be identical. Not error against a known answer, but scatter among equally qualified people looking at the same case. Its best…

Taṇhā, Pali for thirst, is what the Second Noble Truth names as the origin of dukkha. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta gives it in three varieties: thirst for sensual pleasure, thirst for existence…

A techno-panic is the recurring pattern in which a new medium is blamed for a decline in the young. The lineage is long enough to be embarrassing: writing, the printing press, the radio, comics…

Temptation bundling is Katherine Milkman's technique of making something you want available only alongside something you should do, so the want supplies the motivation and the restriction supplies…

Shelley Taylor's 2000 argument that fight-or-flight is not the whole stress response: under threat, people also tend, soothing distress in themselves or a dependant, and befriend, actively building…

Test-retest reliability is how closely a person's score on one occasion matches their own score on a later one. It is reported as a correlation across people between the two occasions. In two…

The 10,000-hour rule is the popular claim that about 10,000 hours of practice produces mastery. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (2008) is the book the authors of a 2019 replication cite for it. In that…

The 2-4-6 task is a rule-discovery puzzle that Peter Wason reported in 1960. Participants had to work out a rule that generates sets of numbers, and the puzzle was built so that testing only sets…

The five whys is a root-cause technique from the Toyota Production System: ask why roughly five times in a row to move past a surface symptom and reach the cause underneath it. Toyota's own…

The 9x effect is John Gourville's rule that a new product has to be about nine times better than the thing it replaces before people will actually switch. The nine is arithmetic, not measurement…