I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know?
• Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn't measure anything, it's unlikely to achieve anything
• The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes
• The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-...
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critical thinking
Fascinating Obscure Concepts That Are Worth Knowing
For years, whenever I've encountered a word for a fascinating concept that my computer's built-in dictionary didn't recognize, I've added it to a collection I keep of "Fascinating Obscure Concepts." Here's the first part of my list of these unusual concepts you may never have encountered before:
—LITTLE-KNOWN SELF-IMPROVEMENT CONCEPTS
1) Musterbating: Albert Ellis' term for rigid, self-imposed ideas that many people hold that "I/you/they absolutely must (or should) do X." Rather than seei...
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Educators Helping To Improve Rational Thinking
I've recently been thinking that there are 4 main categories of educators who are trying to correct bad thinking or help improve rational thinking and that 3 out of 4 of them are essential for improving critical thinking across society (whereas one type is probably harmful):
Child education: those who aim to teach children "critical thinking," - which often (but not always) means teaching the basic thinking, logic, and analysis skills that the majority of adults eventually acquire one way o...
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Three Types of Nuanced Thinking
I think that one of the most important skill sets for good thinking is “Nuanced Thinking,” which is what I call it when you approach a problem with open-mindedness while avoiding binary thinking traps (i.e., resisting dichotomies). Our brains, too often, are dichotomizing machines. We tend to simplify the world into true or false, good or bad, is or is not. This dichotomizing tendency works well when it comes to relatively simple topics like:
• 1+1=2 (true) vs., the Illuminati controls our p...
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