Swart Donkey

Mental Accounting is one of the causes of our biased decision making. We distil complexity into jars. Stories and categories we understand. ...

Goals are not picking the best of every possibility in isolation. That is dreaming. You can close your eyes and visit various places instant...

If you were incredibly small, and you came up to a little drop of water, it would be a huge bubble. We were about three feet tall when we we...

You can’t tell if a coin is biased with one spin. A coin biased to Heads can still fall on Tails. That is pretty compelling evidence that ...

Survivorship Bias is our tendency to see the people who made it through some selection process, without seeing those that did not (even if...

Meritocracy is a step forward from Hereditary Entitlement, but it is a little like salt, fat, and sugar. An easy short term solution that d...

Stale ' Bernie would've won '. ' Hillary would've won '. It is comforting to think in alternate histories, ...

Confidence is rewarded. If someone else seems to understand the world that we don't , there is a natural appeal. As you get older , you...

The temptation is to take everything that happens as evidence to support whatever we believe. Confirmation Bias . ' I told you so '...

We are only able to see a fraction of the light spectrum. Gamma rays, x-rays, ultra-violet, infra-red, microwaves, radio, TV, long-waves -...

We can't concentrate on everything. The world is a complicated place . So what we see depends on what we've seen and what we care...

It is harder to answer the question 'What do you think?' than the question 'What do you feel?'. It may be harder to put fee...

We see based on the way we have seen. Based on what we recognise and what we expect. This helps us make incredibly complex decisions every...

Every now and then I make a cup of tea or coffee and then forget about it because I am doing something else. An hour or two later I see th...

We are only scratching the surface of how the mind works . We know that being human gives us incredible imaginations and our storytelling a...

It used to be the case that you could take things apart, put them back together, and you would know how things worked . Not everything, but...

Some great ideas don't spread. Just because an idea is awesome isn't enough, it needs a dash of mojo to get it going. We are drive...

Stuart points to this article in the Economist which discusses the latest TED conference. He tells me to look out for Bruce Bueno de Mes...

I have not been reading enough of Overcoming Bias recently. Stuart believes most children would get a better education by reading that blo...

On my other far more solemn research orientated blog, Protecting Alpha , I am looking at biases that affect investment decision making, and ...