June 2025
- Jun 7, 2025ExplainersUnderstanding Cognitive Load in LearningThree loads, and which to cut. Intrinsic load is the material's own complexity, extraneous load is wasted effort from poor presentation, and germane load is the productive work of building schemas. Sweller's 1988 paper established the worked example effect, and Kalyuga later documented expertise reversal, where the same examples that help novices start to hinder experts. Working memory holds roughly four to seven chunks.
- Jun 6, 2025ExplainersFrom Game Theory to Negotiation PracticeHow strategic theory translates into negotiation practice. Axelrod invited game theorists to submit strategies for a 200-round iterated prisoner's dilemma in 1980, and the simple Tit-for-Tat, cooperate first then mirror, won; he ran a second tournament with entries built specifically to defeat it and Tit-for-Tat won again. On the practice side, BATNA from Fisher and Ury sets the floor below which no deal should be accepted.
- Jun 5, 2025ExplainersEffective Learning Techniques Based on ScienceKarpicke and Blunt expected the more cognitively demanding elaboration strategy to win and it did not, a result published in Science in 2011. The wider pattern is that effective methods feel worse while you use them, because fluency during study reflects familiarity rather than learning. This page covers encoding and retrieval, expanding spaced repetition schedules, interleaving and when it backfires for novices, cognitive load, and the worked examples effect.
- Jun 5, 2025ExplainersUsing Systems Thinking in Real-World ApplicationsHau Lee documented the case in 1997, tracing the amplification to ordering policies and delays rather than any external shock, which is exactly what Forrester's Beer Game had produced in classrooms four decades earlier. Information sharing and revised ordering cut costs across consumer goods. This page covers reinforcing and balancing loops, stocks and flows, the system archetypes, and Meadows's hierarchy of leverage points from parameters up to paradigms.
- Jun 4, 2025ExplainersPutting Information Theory to WorkWhat Shannon built and how it applies past engineering. His 1948 paper in the Bell System Technical Journal introduced entropy as the measure of information and uncertainty, and achieved its generality by deliberately stripping away the meaning of messages to focus on statistical structure, so a message about a cancer cure and a random string of characters can carry the same information. Information is the reduction of uncertainty.
- Jun 4, 2025ExplainersApplying Network Theory to Personal RelationshipsRajkumar and colleagues published the inverted-U result in Science in 2022, both confirming and correcting Granovetter, whose 1973 Boston survey found 16.7 percent of job leads came from strong ties against 55.6 percent from contacts seen only occasionally. This page also covers Burt's structural holes, where the paper reports a strong negative correlation between salary and network constraint rather than one flat percentage, plus Dunbar's layers and contagion critiques.
- Jun 3, 2025ExplainersTranslating Behavioral Economics into Real DecisionsClassical economics assumed homo economicus, a perfectly rational agent describing a species that does not exist. Simon's bounded rationality showed people satisfice rather than optimize, then Kahneman and Tversky showed the errors are systematic even with time and information. The gap this article closes is between knowing and using: understanding anchoring does not stop an asking price from anchoring you, and knowing about present bias does not start your retirement saving.
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