Concepts (page 97)

  • 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 Illusory Truth Effect

    The illusory truth effect is the finding that a statement met more than once is rated as more likely to be true than a statement met for the first time. The effect appears whether the statement is…

  • 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 Information Gap Theory of Curiosity

    The information gap theory of curiosity is George Loewenstein's 1994 proposal that curiosity is a state of deprivation caused by noticing a gap in what one knows or understands. A person who notices…

  • 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 Intention-Behaviour Moderator

    Past behaviour and stated intention do not compete for one fixed share of the explanation. Judith Ouellette, then at the State University of New York College at Cortland, and Wendy Wood, then at…

  • The Interpretation of Dreams

    Sigmund Freud's book, dated 1900, which treated dreams as disguised expressions of wishes.

  • 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…