List of concepts

Why do we spend so much on wedding rings, do springbok's jump in the air, and is college so expensive?

When should you try something new, or stick with what you already know and like?

How to think about the value of anything extra.

How should we use our 2 systems of thought: gut-feeling, and rational thought?

Why is it so damn hard to find the perfect park or partner?

How do we make decisions under uncertainty? Take a shortcut!

How do we change the world? Shift the Overton window.

Oh boy do we not like receiving conflicting information. Why, and how do we resolve it? Cognitive Dissonance Theory.

What would happen if...

How long will your project take? How much will it cost? Increase your accuracy with reference class forecasting.

Playing with chances and values...

How does our intuition process large numbers? It doesn't.

Coordination problems are at the root of some of the largest problems we have in society, like climate change. 

How much more valuable is it today vs tomorrow?

6 principles to explain how marketing and sales tactics work.

What's the use in trade and specialisation and how should you choose a career? 

Why the champion team won't win next season and early results in science are so often wrong.

How to deal with conflicting information of different strengths and get the right answer on your statistics test.

Who gets what share of the pie and what's the best negotiation strategy?

Was it right to buy that lottery ticket? Well, it depends on whether you're talking ex ante or ex post.

We're all wrong in our unique way, but we're also all wrong in the same ways. Isn't that cute?

How do you win an argument? Debate against a strawman. How do you get to the truth? Steelwoman.

A concept for thinking about what the meaningful information you're trying to detect is. 

Cut through the crap with a tool from your mate, Occam.

Moral hazard, adverse selection, information asymmetry causing problems left, right and center. 

Franky Bacon the Science God, armchair reasoning, and a rationalist-empiricist rumble. 

Is there really not that much you can do? (cue existential dread)

Stretch your mind!

Where do feelings of rightness and wrongness come from?

How to distinguish evidence from reality.

How to get the most out of anything.

Why has violence declined across the globe over the course of history?

How should we view the world and forecast the future?

What's the cost of 'keeping all your doors open'?

What does it even mean for something to be ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’?

An equilibrium is a state of balance where opposing forces are equal to each other.

The map and territory is a metaphor used to illustrate the difference between the actual world and our understanding of the world as we perceive it to be. The ‘map’ is our understanding of the ‘territory’ of reality, and we must be careful to remember that the map is not the territory!

Why the free market gives us too much pollution and too few vaccines

The Pareto principle is the idea that, for many things, roughly 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs. This is why the Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule.

Abstraction is the process of generalising complex events in the real world to the abstract ideas that underly them, tucking away the complexities of the situation.

Something is meta if it is self-referential: if it follows the scheme ‘a thing about a thing’. Learn how meta-analysis, metacognition, and ‘going meta’ all help you in your life.

Natural selection is the process by which the natural environment causes different organisms to survive or die based on their different traits It’s where the term “survival of the fittest” comes from.