“The inside of the circle covers areas where you have knowledge or experience—where you are competent—and in those areas, you can think effectively. In areas outside the circle, you cannot. The most dangerous zone is just outside your circle of competence, where you might think you are competent but you really are not.”

“The essence of thinking gray is this: don’t form an opinion about an important matter until you’ve heard all the relevant facts and arguments, or until circumstances force you to form an opinion without recourse to all the facts (which happens occasionally, but much less frequently than one might imagine).” — Steven Sample

“Consequences, good or bad, that affect an entity without its consent, imposed from an external source … Addressing negative externalities is often referred to as internalizing them. Internalizing is an attempt to require the entity that causes the negative externality to pay for it.”

“(Divergent thinking is) where you actively try to get thinking to diverge in order to discover multiple possible solutions. (Convergent thinking is) where you actively try to get thinking to converge on one solution.”

“In addition to increased decision-making time, there is evidence that a wealth of options can create anxiety in certain contexts. This anxiety is known as the paradox of choice, named after a 2004 book of the same name by American psychologist Barry Schwartz. Schwartz explains that an overabundance of choice, the fear of making a suboptimal decision, and the potential for lingering regret following missed opportunities can leave people unhappy.”

“A decision loop of four steps—observe, orient, decide, act … Take an observing glance at the changing conditions, immediately re-orient their assessment of the situation, decide the next best course of action, act on it without hesitation, and then repeat this loop.”

“Reaching a critical mass is a common proximate cause of a tipping point. But the root cause of why a tipping point has been reached is often found in network effects, where the value of a network grows with each addition to it (the effect).”

“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.”

“Your luck surface area relates to the natural concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system … The natural increase of entropy over time in a closed system is known as the second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of heat. If you consider our universe as the biggest closed system, this law leads to a plausible end state of our universe as a homogenous gas, evenly distributed everywhere, commonly known as the heat death of the universe. On a more practical level, the second law serves as a reminder that orderliness needs to be maintained, lest it be slowly chipped away by disorder. This natural progression is based on the reality that most orderliness doesn’t happen naturally.”

7) The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.

4) The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.

“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.”

To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.

“When you attempt to think about the entire system at once. By thinking about the overall system, you are more likely to understand and account for subtle interactions between components that could otherwise lead to unintended consequences from your decisions.”

“Any shared resource, or commons, is vulnerable to this tragedy … As more and more people make the same decision, the common resource is collectively depleted, reducing the ability for everyone to benefit from it in the future.”

Every investment you make needs to have the potential to be a home run.

“In physics, critical mass is the mass of nuclear material needed to create a nuclear chain reaction, where the by-products of one reaction are used as the inputs for the next, chaining them together in a self-perpetuating fashion.”

Each year, of the 4,000 technology startups seeking VC funding, only 200 (or 5%) are seriously fundable, with 15 of those generating 95% of all economic returns.

“In his 1957 book Parkinson’s Law, Parkinson presents an example of a budget committee considering an atomic reactor and a bike shed, offering that ‘the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.’ The committee members are reluctant to deeply discuss all of the complicated aspects of the atomic reactor decision because it is challenging and esoteric. By contrast, everyone wants to weigh in with their opinion on the bike shed decision because it is easy and familiar relative to the reactor, even though it is also relatively unimportant. This phenomenon has become known as bike-shedding.”

“There is a natural conflict between the desire to make decisions quickly and the feeling that you need to accumulate more information to be sure you are making the right choice. You can deal with this conflict by categorizing decisions as either reversible decisions or irreversible decisions. Irreversible decisions are hard if not impossible to unwind.”

“From biology, there is homeostasis, which describes a situation in which an organism constantly regulates itself around a specific target, such as body temperature. When you get too cold, you shiver to warm up; when it’s too hot, you sweat to cool off. In both cases, your body is trying to revert to its normal temperature. That’s helpful, but the same effect also prevents change from the status quo when you want it to occur … When you fight homeostasis—in yourself or in others—look out for the underlying mechanisms that are working against your efforts to make changes.”

The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.

The retention of few memories from before the age of four.

Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.

In a self-justifying manner retroactively ascribing one's choices to be more informed than they were when they were made.

Overestimating the significance of the present.[129] It is related to the enlightenment Idea of Progress and chronological snobbery with possibly an appeal to novelty logical fallacy being part of the bias.

The tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.

That people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.

Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.[112]

Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.[106]

A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.

When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.[105]

That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).

The more people understand something, the more willing they are to argue about it, and the more vigorously they will do so.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

“The first traits outshine the rest. This is called the primacy effect … The contrasting recency effect matters as well. The more recent the information, the better we remember it … If you have to make an immediate decision based on a series of ‘impressions’ (such as characteristics, exam answers, etc.), the primacy effect weighs heavier. But if the series of impressions was formed some time ago, the recency effect dominates … First and last impressions dominate, meaning the content sandwiched between has only a weak influence.”

“This tendency’s destructive power is so widely known to be intense, with frequent tragic consequences for cognition and the outcome of life, that it needs no discussion here to supplement that previously given under Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial.”

“There is in man, particularly one in an advanced culture, a natural love of accurate cognition and a joy in its exercise.” “This tendency has an obvious implication. It makes man especially prone to learn well when a would-be teacher gives correct reasons for what is taught, instead of simply laying out the desired belief ex cathedra with no reasons given. Few practices, therefore, are wiser than not only thinking through reasons before giving orders but also communicating these reasons to the recipient of the order.” “Unfortunately, Reason-Respecting Tendency is so strong that even a person’s giving of meaningless or incorrect reasons will increase compliance with his orders and requests.”

“People respond to incentives by doing what is in their best interests. What is noteworthy is, first, how quickly and radically people’s behavior changes when incentives come into play or are altered, and second, the fact that people respond to the incentives themselves, and not the grander intentions behind them … If a person’s or an organization’s behavior confounds you, ask yourself what incentive might lie behind it. I guarantee you that you’ll be able to explain 90 percent of the cases this way. What makes up the remaining 10 percent? Passion, idiocy, psychosis, or malice.”

“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” “We should also heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack: ‘If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.'” “One of the most important consequences of incentive superpower is what I call ‘incentive-caused bias.’ A man has an acculturated nature making him a pretty decent fellow, and yet, driven both consciously and subconsciously by incentives, he drifts into immoral behavior in order to get what he wants, a result he facilitates by rationalizing his bad behavior.”