Human Stupidity
The Planning Fallacy: Why Everything Takes Longer Than You Think
The Sydney Opera House was supposed to take six years to build and cost seven million dollars. It took fourteen years and cost 102 million dollars. The Sco…
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Results for "optimism bias"
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Human Stupidity
Human Stupidity
Why Humans Are Terrible at Understanding Risk
People are more afraid of flying than driving, even though driving is dramatically more dangerous per mile traveled. People buy lottery tickets — a tax o…
Human Psychology
Learned Helplessness: When Experience Teaches You to Stop Trying
In the 1960s, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier were conducting experiments with dogs, running standard classical conditioning procedures involving mild ele…
Human Psychology
Why Smart People Make Dumb Decisions Every Single Day
You probably know someone who aced every exam, got into a top university, and still manages to make baffling choices in their personal life. Maybe that per…
How Claude Works
The Ethics of Using AI Like Claude: Practical Considerations
Using AI tools like Claude raises real ethical questions that thoughtful users should think through. Not all of them have clean answers, but being delibera…
AI Ethics & Tips
The Dark Side of Prompt Engineering: Bias, Hallucinations, and Garbage In
Let's talk about the stuff nobody puts in their "10 ways to master ChatGPT" threads. First: hallucinations. ChatGPT will confidently lie to you. I once as…
Human Stupidity
Why We Justify Everything We Do: The Psychology of Self-Deception
There is a version of yourself you carry around in your head that is more consistent, more principled, and more logical than the version that actually move…
Ethics
The Ethical AI User: How to Use AI Responsibly
As AI tools become more powerful and accessible, the onus is on us, the users, to employ them responsibly. Being an ethical AI user isn't about avoiding th…
Ethics
AI and Ethics: Navigating the Challenges of a New Era
With great power comes great responsibility. As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, it’s crucial to have an honest conversation about its ethical…
Rise of America
Reagan and the Reinvention of American Conservatism
By 1980, the United States was in a bad mood. Inflation had been running in double digits. The economy was mired in stagflation — the combination of high…
Philosophy
Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea
Arthur Schopenhauer was the pessimistic counterpoint to Hegel’s optimism. He argued that the world is not a rational, progressive unfolding, but the mani…
Philosophy
Leibniz and the Best of All Possible Worlds
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a polymath and optimist, famously argued that we live in the "best of all possible worlds." This claim, later satirized by Volta…
Rise of America
The Roaring Twenties: American Consumer Culture Is Born
The nineteen twenties in America were years of dizzying transformation in the texture of everyday life. The automobile went from novelty to necessity. Radi…
Adventure
One Piece Live Action Season 2: The Grand Adventure Continues
One Piece shattered the "curse" of bad anime adaptations when it premiered in 2023. The live-action series captured the spirit of Eiichiro Oda's beloved ma…
Technology
Artificial Intelligence Guide What Is AI and How to Use Artificial Intelligence in Daily Life and Business
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most important technological advancements of the modern world. AI refers to computer systems designed to perform…
Human Psychology
Ego Depletion and Willpower: The Glucose Theory of Self-Control
Roy Baumeister introduced the idea of ego depletion in the late 1990s. The hypothesis was simple and compelling: self-control draws on a limited resource…
Human Psychology
The Halo Effect: How One Trait Colours Everything Else We See
Edward Thorndike named the halo effect in 1920 based on his research with military officers. He noticed that officers' ratings of their soldiers were highl…
Machine Learning
Overfitting vs. Underfitting: The Goldilocks Problem
I remember training my first model and seeing 99% accuracy on the training data. I thought I was a genius. Then I ran it on the test data and it got 50%. T…
Human Psychology
Why Humans Are Addicted to Stories Over Facts
Here is a statistic: global child mortality has fallen by more than half since 1990, representing tens of millions of lives saved. Most people have no accu…
Human Psychology
The Hedonic Treadmill: Why Getting What You Want Does Not Make You Happy
In 1978, Philip Brickman and colleagues published a study that should have been more famous than it became. They compared the happiness levels of lottery w…
Human Stupidity
Dunning-Kruger Is Not What You Think It Is
If you spend any time in online debates, you have probably seen the Dunning-Kruger effect invoked. Someone says something confidently wrong, and someone el…
Human Stupidity
The Availability Heuristic: Why Rare Events Feel Common
After a plane crash receives weeks of saturation news coverage, airline ticket sales drop significantly. After a shark attack makes the front page, beach a…
Human Stupidity
Illusory Superiority: Why Everyone Thinks They Are Above Average
Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon is a place where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average…
Human Psychology
The Anchoring Effect: How the First Number You Hear Controls Your Thinking
Before you answer the next question, spin an imaginary wheel of fortune. It stops on 65. Now: what percentage of African countries are members of the Unite…
Machine Learning
Ethics in Machine Learning: More Than Just an Afterthought
It’s easy to get caught up in the technical coolness of ML and forget about the human impact. I’ve had to sit in meetings where we realized our trainin…
How Claude Works
Understanding Claude's Training Data: What Did Claude Learn From?
What did Claude read to become what it is? The training data for large language models is one of the least transparent aspects of AI development, but what'…
Business
AI in Business: How Companies Are Gaining a Competitive Edge
The business landscape is being reshaped by AI, and it's not just the tech giants who are benefiting. Small and medium-sized businesses are leveraging AI t…
Ethics
The Ethics of Letting AI Make Decisions for Us
I was in a webinar last week where a developer said he lets his AI agent decide who gets hired for entry-level positions based on resume screening. It made…
Crime Drama
Talvar (2015): Meghna Gulzar's Riveting Real-Life Crime Drama
Talvar is a chilling, fact-based exploration of the 2008 Noida double murder case that gripped India. Meghna Gulzar directs with remarkable restraint, pres…
AI Psychology
Why Your New AI Chatbot Feels Like a Yes-Sayer (And Why That’s Dangerous)
Ask most AI chatbots a tough question. Should I quit my job? Is my friend using me? Am I wrong in this argument? Nine times out of ten, the bot agrees with…