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August 3, 2025
Most conspiracy theories argue that a mysterious outside evil is trying to control you. By contrast, conspiracy therapy says that the evil force is your own mind.
Certain influencers have overgeneralized the link between unresolved trauma and disease (a teaching which starts to feel especially hairy when you consider, say, childhood cancers).
“On the surface, it can seem like [they’re] empowering the reader with information, but it risks building a kind of psychological dependence on the content creator… If I teach you how to think for yourself, you don’t need me anymore, and I’m out of business,”
Whalen endorsed “real masculinity” as a prevention against COVID, declaring that medical masks were for “little bitch asses.”
“The easiest lies to believe are the ones closest to the truth,” said
In the spirit of trouble, I might as well admit that I think “manifestation” is often little more than a combination of proportionality bias, confirmation bias, and frequency bias.
Also known as the “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” frequency bias is an attention filter that explains the common experience of taking note of something once and then miraculously seeing it again and again. You hear a song for the first time, and suddenly it’s everywhere.
Then, among behavioral economists, there’s talk of the sunk cost fallacy: the deeply ingrained conviction that spending resources you can’t get back—money and time but also emotional resources, like secrets and hope—justifies spending even more.
Doody posed that it’s actually reasonable enough to want to continue a project based on the time and energy you’ve already spent on it, given the universal motivation to create a positive impression of one’s decision-making track record.
When presented with a problem, most people naturally think the cause must be that something is missing, rather than that something is gratuitous or out of place.
A toxic relationship is just a cult of one.
“But if we can’t honor the fact that life isn’t either all panic or all contentment, then that just exacerbates feelings of anxiety and depression. It isn’t helpful. We need to honor that multiple truths can exist at once,”
This cognitive exhaustion, paired with our attraction to newness, causes us to flip-flop between topics at quickening intervals.
Dunning-Kruger effect, a pattern where people with the littlest knowledge on a subject consistently prove themselves likeliest to overvalue their expertise.
Upon closer examination, the famous experiment did not account for enough social and psychological factors (mood, age, etc.) to prove definitively that knowing very little is what causes a person to think they know a lot. Most people, even experts, systematically overestimate their skills. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,”
The inclination appears in three key forms: people overvalue their actual skills, express excessive certainty in their evaluations, and overcredit themselves with positive outcomes. Austerely, this trifecta is labeled overconfidence bias.
Researchers have deduced that unless a person is navigating some major psychological interference like PTSD or clinical depression,I nearly everyone alive naturally overestimates their moral compass, everyday skills, and common knowledge with a consistency I still find hard to accept.
As journalist Roger Lowenstein wrote in his book When Genius Failed, “There is nothing like success to blind one to the possibility of failure.”
If I had to know exactly what I wanted to say in this book before putting pen to paper, I would never have started nor finished.
“Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free.”
Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast and milk our exceptionalism for all it’s worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness.
We can assign much of the blame to a bias known as the illusory truth effect—our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times.
