cognition

Judge a decision by the distribution of outcomes it could have produced, not the one that happened to occur.#alternative-histories

The emotional brain receives the signal first and can commandeer behaviour before the thinking brain has the facts.#amygdala-hijack

Comparisons to past technologies establish the range of possible outcomes, not a probability over them.#analogies-are-rangefinders

Mark where the argument turns, not where it arrives — conclusions are findable by flipping, inferences are invisible without your help.#annotate-the-hinge

Expert marginalia is an argument with the author — agreement marks are the signature of naive reading.#argue-with-the-author

Working memory holds about four chunks, not four items — expertise enlarges what fits in a slot rather than adding slots.#chunks-not-items

Know where the edge of your knowledge is — the boundary matters far more than the size of the circle.#circle-of-competence

Most decisions are made by defaults, not by choice — the work is converting automatic reactions into deliberate ones.#default-not-choice

Self-regulation predicts later outcomes better than IQ does.#delayed-gratification-predicts

Conditions that make learning feel harder tend to make it last longer — fluency is a misleading signal.#desirable-difficulty

Ego, emotion, social pressure, and inertia hijack a decision before reasoning ever starts.#enemies-of-reason

Producing your own sentence about an idea encodes durably; recognising someone else’s does almost nothing.#generation-over-recognition

Solve for what would guarantee failure and refuse to do that, instead of solving directly for success.#invert-always-invert

Hold a latticework of models from many disciplines — a single-discipline mind bends every problem to fit its one tool.#latticework-of-models

Biases don't add, they multiply — several small pressures acting together produce outcomes none would produce alone.#lollapalooza-effect

Real uncertainty is not a casino — dice have known odds, life does not, and models built on games mislead exactly where it matters.#ludic-fallacy

Ideas are replicators under the same selection pressure — an idea spreads because it is good at spreading, not because it is true.#memes-replicate-too

The market is a manic partner quoting you a price daily — you are never obliged to trade, only to decide whether the quote is useful.#mr-market

We compress the past into stories that feel explanatory and predict nothing — coherence is not evidence.#narrative-fallacy

Everyone's money decisions make sense given the era and cohort that formed them — 'irrational' usually means 'calibrated on a different sample'.#nobody-is-crazy

Quantifying a risk changes how it feels, not how likely it is — the number’s real work is often psychological.#numbers-domesticate-fear

The intention to learn has no power of its own — retention is determined by the operations you actually ran on the material.#operations-not-intentions

Naming an emotion while it is happening is the first competence — everything else is built on it.#self-awareness-is-the-base

The record was written by what survived — the failures that would refute the thesis left no documents.#silent-evidence

Meaning is not enough if it is left unarranged — hierarchy gives spreading activation something to travel along.#structure-before-memory

You only ever see the winners — the graveyard of identical strategies that failed is silent and uncounted.#survivorship-bias

Investing success is a matter of temperament rather than IQ — the binding constraint is behavioural, not analytical.#temperament-over-intellect

A failed retrieval attempt followed by feedback beats spending the same time reading.#test-before-you-study

Between stimulus and response there is a space, and skill is widening it enough to step into on purpose.#the-space

There are two 'yous' — the emotional actor and the rational designer; step out and design the machine the emotional you operates.#two-yous