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20 of the most important ideas
everyone should know:
11:50 AM - Jun 21, 2022 - Typefully
1,891 Retweets 65 Quote Tweets 6,222 Likes1. Cunningham's Law:
The best way to find the right
answer on the internet is not to ask
the right question, but to post the
wrong answer.
Why? Because people are more
interested in criticizing others than
helping them.
11:50 AM - Jun 21, 2022 - Typefully
107 Retweets 11 Quote Tweets 986 Likes2. The Streisand Effect:
In some cases, an effort to kill an
idea can lead to it becoming more
popular instead.
Banned books and music albums
that end up becoming popular
precisely because they were banned
are the most famous examples of
this effect.3. Dunning-Kruger Effect:
People with little knowledge of a
field will often overestimate their
competence compared to more
experienced players.
American Idol was a great example
of amateurs who overestimated
their ability to sing.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
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Valley of Despair
Know nothing Competence4. The Lindy Effect:
The life of perishable things, like
food, decreases with age.
But the life of non-perishable things,
like ideas, increases with age.
The ideas that are most likely to
exist 1,000 years from now are the
ideas that have already existed for
1,000 years.5. Confirmation bias:
We demand extraordinarily strong
evidence for ideas that do not align
with our beliefs, while accepting
extraordinarily weak evidence for
ideas that do.6. Hick's Law
The effort required to make a
decision increases with the number
of options.
The more options you offer, the
harder it is for customers to decide.
This is why most companies are now
creating products with fewer
options.7. Brandolini's Law:
The amount of effort required to
debunk misinformation is orders of
magnitudes higher than the amount
of effort required to create it.
This is why misinformation is so
widely spread on the internet.8. Cultural Parasitism:
The ideas and beliefs that are most
widely spread in society are the
ones that are most likely to be
transmitted to others - not the ones
that are most likely to be true.
Fake news is an example of an idea
that spreads very quickly despite
eta Moe9. Luxury Beliefs:
Beliefs that confer status on the
upper class while inflicting costs on
the lower class.
Example: elites who support the
abolition of police while living in
privately guarded communities
themselves, leaving poorer
neighbourhoods to suffer the
consequences.10. Decoy Effect:
Asymmetric numbers can influence
our perception of what is
acceptable.
This is how cinemas sell more
popcorn.
By artificially increasing the price of
the middle option, they make the
largest option the most attractive.
Small Medium Large
$3.50 $6 $6.5011. Incentive bias:
Strong incentives can cause people
to adopt beliefs that are incorrect or
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"It is difficult to get a man to
understand something when his
salary depends upon his not
understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair12. Reciprocity bias:
We feel obliged to repay people who
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Example: When waiters gift free
mints with the bill, customer tips go
Vlom oy ale So13. Mimetic Desire:
People have a desire to be more like
their role models by copying them.
This is why athletes like LeBron and
Ronaldo are paid so much to wear
Nikes:
People think they can be more like
their role models by wearing what
their idols are wearing.14. Risk Aversion
We often hesitate to purchase
things because we hate the thought
of buying something and regretting
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This is why companies like Netflix
offer free trials - to counter our risk
aversion.15. Uncertainty Aversion:
People are more bothered by the
uncertainty of a wait than the
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This is why you see countdown
clocks at traffic signals.
It's also why your food delivery app
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food to arrive.16. Social Proof:
When people don't know how to
act, they will blindly copy what
everyone else is doing.
This is how smoking spread among
women in the US - advertisers paid
female models to smoke at public
A -TaL toe17. Fredkin's Paradox:
The more similar two options are,
the more difficult it is to decide
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You will spend much more time
deciding between a Honda and a
Toyota, than you will deciding
between a Honda and a Ferrari.18. Status-seeking:
When choosing between 2 options,
people will often pick the one that
enhances their social status - even
if that option is very costly.
Example: People will pay $2,500 for
a branded handbag, even though its
functionality is identical to a $250
ee }em19. Evolutionary Mismatch:
Humans evolved in scarcity but now
live in abundance.
This makes it difficult for us to resist
things that are abundant today but
scarce in the past - like sugar and
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This evolutionary mismatch causes
many problems like obesity and
addiction.20. Metcalfe's Law:
The value of a network increases as
the number of users in that network
increases.
This is how social media works: the
more friends you have using an app,
the more likely you are to join and
use that app.PVC)
3 @heykahn
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