memory

In memory of Daniel Kahneman, who accelerated our understanding of the mind

March 27, 2024
Photo by Andreas Weigend on Flickr. Cropped but otherwise unaltered. Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license
I'm not a person who has idols, but Daniel Kahneman came about as close as it gets for me. It is not an exaggeration to say that he revolutionized our understanding of the mind. Among many other concepts, Kahneman and his collaborators came up with the ideas of: Anchoring (where an irrelevant number can influence our judgments) Prospect theory (a theory of how we make judgments when there is uncertainty that incorporates a number of biases) The focusing illusion (where we overempha...
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Memorializing Compliments

June 28, 2017
A practice I highly recommend, that few people have tried: keep a list of the most meaningful compliments people have given you, review it at periodic intervals, or when you could use a boost. Why discard these valuable things in the leaky waste bin we call memory?The flip side of this, of course, is: if you have a meaningful and genuine compliment to give, then don't forget to tell the person who it's about! What a loss not to do so. Thank you to those of you who have contributed to my l...
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How Can We Learn From Our Mistakes?

January 14, 2012
Suppose that you'd like to make fewer mistakes. How do you go about actually learning from the ones you've already made, rather than repeating them? The first step is to admit to yourself that you've made a mistake. Trivial errors, like accidentally putting the container of orange juice in the freezer, are easy enough to come to terms with. But for more serious matters, or matters that involve pride or shame, our minds often recoils at the pain caused by acknowledging we've screwed up. We mak...
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