More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 28 - March 10, 2025
While magical thinking is an age-old quirk, overthinking feels distinct to the modern era—a product of our innate superstitions clashing with information overload, mass loneliness, and a capitalistic pressure to “know” everything under the sun.
Identified in the early twentieth century, the halo effect describes the unconscious tendency to make positive assumptions about a person’s overall character based on our impressions of one single trait.
“Community, one of our most elemental human pleasures, has been decimated by COVID, politics, technology, capitalism… Swift’s performance might be fixed, perfect, but what happens in the crowd is messy, wild, benevolent, and beautiful.”
In both private and public spheres, worship is dehumanizing. To be deified is not so flattering; the dynamic risks annihilating a person’s room for complexity and blunders, and this sets up everyone for suffering.
The psychological craving for big events (and big feelings) to have equally big causes is instinctive. It’s called proportionality bias—and while behavioral economists regard this inclination as the driving force behind extreme conspiracy theories like QAnon, it fools even the most rational minds into overestimating cause-and-effect relationships.
As of the 2020s, manifestation may very well be the slyest conspiracy theory of them all.
In virtually every context, we cannot seem to rest until we find some intentional force either to fault for our misery or credit for our success.
The greater the effect, the greater we desire the cause to be.
Paranoia is a profitable d...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
2018, MIT found that true stories take six times longer to reach 1,500 people on Twitter than false ones.
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.
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.
Sunk cost fallacy emerges when you feel compelled to finish all nineteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy even though you lost interest long ago, because you’re two hundred episodes in and already paid the cable bill. Or when you’re sorely losing at poker and decide to say, “Fuck it,” and go all in, because you’ve put so much on the table already and couldn’t live with yourself if you folded. The bias is tied to loss aversion, humans’ spiritual allergy to facing defeat.
This kind of scarcity-minded sorrow is rooted in zero-sum bias: the false intuition that another party’s gain directly means your loss. Zero-sum bias tells us that if another person is succeeding, then you must be failing.
Pitting myself against other women on the internet was a pattern long ago embedded in my system, but now, it wasn’t just about looks, it was about my career, my wit, my soul.
The deception that capitalism and feminism pair well is premium zero-sum bias fuel. In my professional life, I have been swindled under the guise of “partnership” and “mentorship” by more than a handful of women, who were at once victims and perpetrators of the patriarchy’s zero-sum game.
But that’s the trick with survivorship bias, the propensity to focus on positive outcomes while ignoring any accompanying misfortunes.
Survivorship bias beckons thinkers to draw incorrect conclusions about “why” something turned out well by fixating too narrowly on the people or objects that made it past a certain benchmark, while overlooking those that didn’t.
“Inspiration porn” defines a whole media genre where folks with severe health impairments are depicted trouncing obstacles with sheer will.
Turns out, this objectively nonsensical style of panic sprouts from a deep-rooted cognitive bias called the recency illusion—the tendency to assume that something is objectively new, and thus threatening, simply because it’s new to you.I
Headlines and thumbnails wield a physiological power. They work to hijack our amygdalas, the tiny kidney-bean-shaped region of the brain’s limbic system, its emotional headquarters.
If clickbait is the trigger that sets off our cognitive alarm systems, news algorithms are the anarchists pulling it.
The digital media industry could not exist without the recency illusion, and while much of the alarmism is manufactured with profit and perniciousness, this bias spares no one.
Our nervous systems struggle to sustain agitation for the many crises news platforms serve us, especially when material changes don’t result right away.
A 2019 study by scientists at the Technical University of Denmark suggested that over the last century, the sheer quantity of knowable information has caused the global attention span to shrink.
Gazing up at a deciduous oak isn’t some enchanted solution to everyone’s problems, of course. But, where the recency illusion is concerned, connecting with the physical world we were made for opens up a tiny mental wormhole, allowing us to recast time for just long enough to remember that a headline in your feed is not a predator in the bushes or crop circle in your backyard. With that spare glint of awareness, we can determine with better clarity if a piece of news is more deserving of our precious time and cognitive resources than the one we were worried about yesterday. I’m convinced we
...more
“Bitch, be humble.” —Kendrick Lamar
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.
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.
The bias explains why, until I was eighteen years old, I was genuinely certain that if you swallowed a piece of gum, it would take seven years to digest. But it’s also how political propaganda is able to spread so effortlessly, like an X-Acto knife slicing through wrapping paper.
Dr. Sheila Bock, a folklorist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told me that society’s most repeated proverbs “are not necessarily the ones that are true, but are the ones that make ‘good cultural sense.’ ”
Confirmation bias has crept into mainstream discourse like a sleeper hit indie song, thanks to analyses of our ever-intensifying political divides—and the role of algorithmic newsfeeds in entrenching users’ beliefs and dehumanizing their opponents. Broadly, the bias is characterized by a universal tendency to favor information that validates our existing views and discard that which refutes them. It’s an ancient heuristic that oozes into nearly every decision a person might make, from macro-level political ideologies to minor daily character assessments (say, swiping left on a potential date
...more
Once you’ve committed to an idea and defended its prudence, adjusting your mental framework to new data is much harder than just ignoring it, or shoehorning it in and performing whatever psychological Pilates will make it stick.
My favorite neologism of the century so far is “anemoia,” which describes the feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.
People get overwhelmed by the present and disappear into the past.
Idealizing the far-off past, while very much enjoying the modern comforts of the present, has become a curious cultural pattern.
Nostalgia softens an era’s harsh edges, so we can sink back into a warm bath of fantasy.
Cognitive psychology research has revealed that memories of negative emotions dwindle quicker than the positive,II a phenomenon known as the fading affect bias. Because most of us prefer reminiscing about happy times, our cheery revisions grow stronger, while bad memories wither away, leading to a general idealization of the past. Declinism explains why one might thumb through old photos of themselves, longing to be nineteen and baby-cheeked again, even if they know that age felt miserable and directionless in the moment.
Coco Mellors, author of the novel Blue Sisters, hates nostalgia. She got sober about a decade ago and harbors little sentimentality for the years prior. “Nostalgia feels dishonest,” she told me. “The past is inherently conflicted and nuanced, but nostalgia reduces it to its most benign.”
Kristin S liked this
Fatalistic hyperbole has gone trendy vernacular.
In 2016, Oxford economist and philosopher Max Roser wrote a piece for Vox titled “Proof That Life Is Getting Better for Humanity, in 5 Charts.”
My all-time favorite nostalgic TV rewatch is the early-2000s HBO series Six Feet Under. During bouts of distress, I’ll flick on an episode or two of the dramedy about a family-run funeral home, and it feels like an embrace from a macabre fairy godmother.
A therapist in a large beaded necklace once told me over video chat that in order to yank your attention into the present, you’re supposed to do things with your hands. “Watercolors, card tricks, any hands-on hobby,” she said, her kind eyes squinting glitchily over Zoom.
Our lamp sold above asking price to a shiny-haired college student within an hour of posting. But it was never about the money. It was about that feeling. Finally, I grasped what that therapist meant. Nothing satisfies the spirit quite like building something yourself, or at least helping to. At the same time, nothing had ever warped my perception of “value” with such efficiency. What is it about a human hand?
The propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create is a cognitive bias, known as the IKEA effect.
Like the sunk cost fallacy, the IKEA effect is at its core another effort justification bias. How we love to defend our most expensive, time-consuming, irreversible choices.
It’s no stretch to picture AI figuring out how to approximate the texture of our audacity, or invent its very own, well enough to inspire awe.
