Reads more like a memoir sprinkled with some research. I don’t think it’s anything we don’t already know (manifestation as a symptom of the modern society etc etc) but it’s a pretty easy and light-hearted read.

4 stars

I really enjoyed the reading experience of this book, although I can't say it feels super memorable to me. There were definitely a few chapters/concepts that were a bit less interesting to me than others, but that could be expected from an essay collection type of book.

Notes/Quotes (not every chapter)

* proportionality bias: psychological craving for big events (and big feelings0 to have equally big causes in instinctive.
* “small, mundane explanations for important events” (e.g. Princess Diana died because her limo driver was drunk and speeding to avoid paparazzi are generally not as satiating as more dramatic explanations (she was murdered by the British government).
* Frequency bias can cause medical doctors to over-diagnose a condition just because they’ve recently read up on it. In 2019, a med student named Kush Purohit sent a letter of concern about frequency bias… reporting that after he learned of a condition… he happened to discover 3 more cases of it within the next 24 hours.
* sunk cost fallacy: When we find ourselves in the middle of a losing situation—from a toxic relationship or exploitative spiritual group to something as low-stakes as a boring movie—we tend to persevere, telling ourselves that the win we expected is coming any moment now. That way, we don’t have to admit to ourselves that we made a bad bet and lost.
* Doody posed that it’s actually reasonable enough to want to continue a project based on the time and energy you’ve already spent on it, given the universal motivation to create a positive impression of one’s decision-making track record.
* …researchers presented participants with a pattern and asked them to make it symmetrical by either adding or removing colored blocks…only 20% opted to solve the problem by taking blocks away—a subtractive approach. This bias toward additive solutions is widespread…when presented with a problem, most people naturally think the cause must be that something is missing, rather than something is gratuitous or out of place… sometimes what you actually need to be happy is to take something away.
* …it’s never too late to cut your losses. At any time, you can unload the heavy pack from your shoulders, leave it on the mountain, and turn back, because the view you were promised isn’t actually pup there, and it’s not worth the climb anymore.
* zero-sum bias: the false intuition that another party’s gain directly means your loss
* there was a limited quantity of light in the universe, I was sure, and merely learning that someone else was burning bright dimmed me.
* whenever someone profits from an exchange, we tend to assume that the other guy must have gotten ripped off, even though that’s the opposite of how trade actually works, or else no one would do it.
* …smorgasbord of everyday misbeliefs linked to zero-sum bias, like that the government can’t possibly support one group without directly harming another, or that buyers of a good or service are far less likely to benefit from the transaction than sellers. The researchers labeled this fallacious outlook “win-win denial”…
* zero-sum bias affects those who’ve been nurtured by individualist societies, which stress win-lose binaries at every turn.
* students living in East Asian countries were significantly more likely than Westerners to value being a “small fish in a large pond.” That is, they would prefer to work a lower-ranking job at a more prestigious company than higher up at a small, no-name firm. Meanwhile, kids who come of age in a society that pushes them to do whatever it takes to capture an enviable title, and not worry who’s ravaged along the way, will likely learn to treat all success-geared activities as zero-sum.
* Social comparison is instinctive, and, at best, it aids in identity formation. no one exits the womb fully equipped with the tools to self-actualize. People have always looked to each other to figure out who they hell they are. As kids, we go to the playground, watch TV, or read about people in books and magazines, and we use that info to select qualities we’d like to feature more or less in ourselves. “Well on Instagram or TikTok, those sources of inspiration come to life 24/7… Who can resist the urge to go to a playground that’s always open?”
* recency illusion: tendency to assume that something is objectively new, and thus threatening, because it’s new to you
* overconfidence bias
* Dunning-Kruger effect didn’t say quite what many of us thought it did. Upon closer examination, the famous experiment did not account for enough social and psychological factors (mood, age, etc) to prove definitively that knowing very little is what causes a person to think they know a lot. Most people, even experts, systematically overestimate their skills. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” clarified Dunning…
* even though overconfident parties were expected to lose more wars, they also entered more wars, “effectively ‘buying more lottery tickets’ in the competition for survival.”
* …self-serving bias is also at play. The offender’s mistake reminds the complainant of how virtuous they are for having avoided the same foible, however narrowly… “It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.”
* Studies show that not only dow we swiftly forget the info we learn via web search, we actually forget that we forgot it—we confuse the internet’s knowledge for our own.
* humility is defined by “a low focus on the self, an accurate sense of one’s accomplishments and worth, and an acknowledgment of one’s limitations, imperfections, mistakes, gaps in knowledge…” Every hour I’ve wasted worrying that other people were keeping track of my failures, nitpicking… was not humility, it was just more self-focus.
* We cannot perceive self-doubt as a weakness, and we shouldn’t demand undying certainty even from experts, or they will surely bullshit us in order to meet that expectation.
* illusory truth effect: our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times
* a legend is defined by 3 core qualities: It’s told as true but clearly carries undertone of doubt; its content is extremely difficult or impossible to confirm; and, not unlike a superstition, it helps us to capture and cope with culture-wide fears.
* when an utterance is more attractive, we also take it to be more trustworthy (rhyme-as-reason rule)
* declinism:
* “Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.” (Le Guin, Tales From Earthsea)
* fading affect bias: memories of negative emotions dwindle quicker than the positive
* She quotes James Baldwin… “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”
* John Koenig called “avenoir,” the impossible desire to see memories in advance. “We take it for granted that life moves froward. But you move a s a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going… Your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way.”
* “Nostalgia is a powerful creative tool, because it sits at the border of real and imaginary. It lets you turn events from your own life into fantasies”
* We’re still missing a term for that obscure sorrow—a plaintive longing for what’s happening right now, a futile hope that it never ends…I propose “tempusur,” a portmanteau of the Latin tempus, meaning “time”, and susurrus, meaning “whisper.” Tempusur: an elusive nostalgia for the current moment, so precious in its ephemerality that the second you notice it, it’s already slipped away.
* IKEA effect: propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create
* conflating self-worth with employment is one. of capitalism’s wiliest tricks, but research finds that both humans and little creatures by creeks to appreciate a certain amount of labor.
* “What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe… almost exclusively predicated on our limitations… It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.” By Nick Cave’s measure, as impressive as posthuman creativity might be, it “simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it?”
* In “Context,” Plath problematized what she called “headline poetry”—choosing to reference the er’s major political conflicts so directly and sensationally in poems, as if the mid-20th century was sure to go down as the most worrying time in history and should be immortalized as such. Plath challenged readers to widen their lens. “For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse.”