Super Thinking Quotes

“Avoid succumbing to the gambler’s fallacy or the base rate fallacy. Anecdotal evidence and correlations you see in data are good hypothesis generators, but correlation does not imply causation—you still need to rely on well-designed experiments to draw strong conclusions. Look for tried-and-true experimental designs, such as randomized controlled experiments or A/B testing, that show statistical significance. The normal distribution is particularly useful in experimental analysis due to the central limit theorem. Recall that in a normal distribution, about 68 percent of values fall within one standard deviation, and 95 percent within two. Any isolated experiment can result in a false positive or a false negative and can also be biased by myriad factors, most commonly selection bias, response bias, and survivorship bias. Replication increases confidence in results, so start by looking for a systematic review and/or meta-analysis when researching an area.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“High-stakes testing culture—be it for school examinations, job interviews, or professional licensing—creates perverse incentives to “teach to the test,” or worse, cheat.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“sustainable competitive advantage.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Sayre’s law, named after political scientist Wallace Sayre, offers that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. A related concept is Parkinson’s law of triviality, named after naval historian Cyril Parkinson, which states that organizations tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“The general model for this impact comes from economics and is called path dependence, meaning that the set of decisions, or paths, available to you now is dependent on your past decisions.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“The implication is that when people realized they were being watched by their governments, some of them stopped reading articles that they thought could get them into trouble. The name for this concept is chilling effect.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“If you do engage, another trap to watch out for is the observer effect, where there is an effect on something depending on how you observe it, or even who observes”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“A related model to watch out for is the hydra effect, named after the Lernaean Hydra, a beast from Greek mythology that grows two heads for each one that is cut off. When you arrest one drug dealer, they are quickly replaced by another who steps in to meet the demand. When you shut down an internet site where people share illegal movies or music, more pop up in its place. Regime change in a country can result in an even worse regime.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“In fact, there is a mental model for this more specific situation, called the cobra effect, describing when an attempted solution actually makes the problem worse.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Campbell’s law) in his 1979 study, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change.” He explains the concept a bit more precisely: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Nobel Prize–winning physicist Max Planck explained it like this in his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” or, more succinctly, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Vaccinations provide an illustrative example that combines all these models (tragedy of the commons, free rider problem, tyranny of small decisions, public goods), plus one more: herd immunity. Diseases can spread only when they have an eligible host to infect. However, when the vast majority of people are vaccinated against a disease, there are very few eligible new hosts, since most people (in the herd) are immune from infection due to getting vaccinated. As a result, the overall public is less susceptible to outbreaks of the disease. In this example, the public good is a disease-free environment due to herd immunity, and the free riders are those who take advantage of this public good by not getting vaccinated. The tyranny of small decisions can arise when enough individuals choose not to get vaccinated, resulting in an outbreak of the disease, creating a tragedy of the commons.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in the next ten.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“The next time you feel inclined to make an accusation, take a step back and think about whether that is really a fair assumption to make.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“The key is learning to describe the gap—or difference—between your story and the other person’s story. Whatever else you may think and feel, you can at least agree that you and the other person see things differently.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“In any conflict between two people, there are two sides of the story. Then there is the third story, the story that a third, impartial observer would recount. Forcing yourself to think as an impartial observer can help you in any conflict situation, including difficult business negotiations and personal disagreements.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“to be wrong less when thinking about people, you must find ways to increase your empathy, opening up a deeper understanding of what other people are really thinking.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“It’s easy to focus solely on what is put in front of you. It’s much harder to seek out an objective frame of reference, but that is what you need to do in order to be wrong less.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“When you put many similar filter bubbles together, you get echo chambers, where the same ideas seem to bounce around the same groups of people, echoing around the collective chambers of these connected filter bubbles. Echo chambers result in increased partisanship, as people have less and less exposure to alternative viewpoints. And because of availability bias, they consistently overestimate the percentage of people who hold the same opinions.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“It discovered that people got significantly different results, personalized to them, when searching for the same topics at the same time.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Since there are only so many items they can show you—only so many links on page one of the search results—they therefore filter out links they think you are unlikely to click on, such as opposing viewpoints, effectively placing you in a bubble.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Because of availability bias, you’re likely to click on things you’re already familiar with, and so Google, Facebook, and many other companies tend to show you more of what they think you already know and like.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“With the rise of personalized recommendations and news feeds on the internet, availability bias has become a more and more pernicious problem. Online this model is called the filter bubble,”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“More broadly, these mental models are all instances of a more general model, availability bias, which occurs when a bias, or distortion, creeps into your objective view of reality thanks to information recently made available to you.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Anchoring isn’t just for numbers. Donald Trump uses this mental model, anchoring others to his extreme positions, so that what seem like compromises are actually agreements in his favor.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“You get anchored to the first piece of framing information you encounter.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Another concept you will find useful when making purchasing decisions is anchoring, which describes your tendency to rely too heavily on first impressions when making decisions.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“You can be nudged in a direction by a subtle word choice or other environmental cues.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Even though the participants saw the same film, the wording of the question affected their answers.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“A related trap/trick is nudging.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models