General Concepts Flashcards
(12 cards)
What is the ostrich effect?
We often try to avoid info that will cause us stress. Thus bills and work emails remain unopened, etc. This is a counterproductive since it prolongs the anxiety of it.
Nobel Disease
We idolize those who excel ina particular field, inflating their egos and afflicting them with the hubris to opine on matters they know little about. By celebrating their intelligence we make them stupid.
Epistemic humility
Instead of trying to be right, you should try to be less wrong since its easier to avoid idiocy than achieving genius.
Peter principle
People in a hierarchy such as a business or government will be promoted until they suck at their jobs, at which point they will remain. As a result, a lot of people suck at their job.
Meme theory
An Ideology parasitizes the mind, changing so that it can spread to other people. Therefore, a successful ideology is not configured to be true, its configured to spread.
The lindy effect
The longer a non-biologixal system has existed, the longer it’s likely to exist, because its age demonstrates its ability to weather the fickleness of fashions and the erosion of eons.
The liar’s dividend
Teaching people about disinformation makes them believe more stuff are disinformation.
The potato paradox
Alice has 100kg of potatoes, which are 99% water. She lets them dry till they are 98% water. What is their new weight?
50kg.
Sound crazy? A reminder that the truth is often counterintuitive. Look at what stayed the same, the 1kg potato.
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
It takes a lot longer to refute bullshit than to produce it
The Two-Minute Rule
If a task would take less than two minutes, do it immediately. This is because adding the task to your mental to-do list, keeping it in your memory, and managing the anxiety of not having done it will take far more effort than just doing it now.
What is network theory?
Network theory is the study of graphs as a representation of either symmetric relations or asymmetric relations between discrete objects. In computer science and network science, network theory is a part of graph theory: a network can be defined as a graph in which nodes and/or edges have attributes (e.g. names).
The Lucretius problem, what is it?
It is for example when you take a prior, for example, the previous unemployment rate, as a given or worst-case scenario not understanding that there once was another worst-case scenario prior to that. Thus basing the current lowest as worst is just wrong.
