Ockham's Razor vs Hanlon's Razor vs Chesterton's Fence Explained
Expert-written explanation of three classic reasoning heuristics with when to apply each, common misapplications, and decision examples.
April 2026
January 2026
Heuristics Explained
Heuristics are mental shortcuts for fast decisions: availability judges by what comes to mind, representativeness by similarity to stereotypes.
January 2025
Anchoring and Adjustment: Why the First Number Shapes Every Number After
Tversky and Kahneman spun a rigged wheel that landed on either 10 or 65, then asked subjects how many African countries are in the United Nations.
December 2024
The Affect Heuristic: How Feelings Become Facts About Risk
Paul Slovic found that people who feel positively about nuclear power judge its risks as low and its benefits as high.
The Representativeness Heuristic: Why We Judge by Resemblance and Pay the Price
Linda is 31, outspoken, a philosophy major, passionate about social justice. Is she more likely to be a bank teller, or a bank teller active in the...
November 2024
The Anchoring Bias: How the First Number You Hear Colonizes Your Mind
In 1974, Kahneman and Tversky spun a rigged wheel in front of subjects — who knew it was rigged — and it still bent their estimates.
The Availability Heuristic
Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects whether more English words begin with the letter K or have K as their third letter. Most said K-first — wrong by a factor of three. Words starting with K are just easier to retrieve. The availability heuristic: we judge probability and frequency by how easily examples come to mind, not by how common they actually are. The science behind risk misperception, media effects, and why we fear the wrong things.