August 2026
April 2026
March 2026
February 2026
- Feb 19, 2026ConceptsAnalytical Models vs IntuitionGary Klein found that expert firefighters and commanders rarely compare options, instead recognizing a situation and simulating one response, while Kahneman documented where confident intuition fails. Their 2009 joint paper sets the condition: trust intuition only where real practice meets a high-validity environment with fast, clear feedback. The page contrasts calibrated weather forecasters with stock analysts and revisits Meehl's actuarial formulas.
- Feb 17, 2026ConceptsWhat Are Mental Models and Why They MatterA mental model is a simplified representation of how something works, and it decides what you notice before reasoning begins. The clearest evidence that model quality beats raw memory comes from Chase and Simon's chess research: shown real positions for five seconds, masters reproduced about 16 pieces to a novice's four, but on randomly arranged boards managed only about 3-4. Also traces model failures at NASA, in 2008 risk models, and at Toyota.
- Feb 15, 2026ConceptsFrameworks and Complexity: Simplifying Decision-MakingHerbert Simon won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that real decision-makers cannot optimize and must satisfice, and his point was not that this is a flaw to overcome. Because working memory holds roughly four items, complex problems exceed capacity unless structured. Frameworks chunk information so a physician reads fever, white cell count and localized pain as one concept. The six mechanisms that do the simplifying, each paired with how it fails.
- Feb 3, 2026ConceptsCognitive Principles That Shape DecisionsEight constraints that govern how people actually decide, from Simon's bounded rationality and Cowan's revision of working memory capacity down to roughly four items, through cognitive load, attention scarcity, and dual process theory. Johnson and Goldstein's study in Science shows what follows: opt-out countries reached organ donation rates of 85 to 99 percent while opt-in countries managed 4 to 28 percent, with broadly similar populations and attitudes.
- Feb 1, 2026ConceptsUniversal Principles That Apply Across DomainsWest, Brown and Enquist showed mammalian metabolic rate scales as body mass to the 3/4 power, and West later found city productivity and innovation scale superlinearly with population, at roughly the 1.15 power. The same fractal branching logic governs trees, circulatory systems and river basins. Ten principles covered: compound effects, leverage, feedback loops, diminishing returns, opportunity cost, inertia, path dependence, scale effects, conservation and thresholds.
January 2026
- Jan 31, 2026ConceptsWhat Is a Principle and Why It MattersRules cover anticipated situations; principles explain why things work, so they transfer to situations no rulebook predicted. The article distinguishes principles from tactics and values, gives four tests for a genuine principle, and shows why competing principles need judgment. Chi, Feltovich and Glaser's 1981 study found novices grouped physics problems by surface features, while experts grouped them by underlying principles.
- Jan 29, 2026ConceptsWhy Principles Outlast TacticsThe case for learning why something works rather than memorizing what to do, with four methods for extracting a principle from a tactic: ask why repeatedly, find the pattern across tactics that succeed, test it in another domain, and name the mechanism. The durability claim is checked against a review of 363 New England Journal of Medicine articles testing established practice, of which 146, about 40%, proved to be reversals.
- Jan 27, 2026ConceptsHow the Mind Actually WorksThe mind is a set of specialized systems rather than one general processor: fast automatic processing, a slow deliberate system that often just endorses the first answer, reconstructive memory, and an attentional bottleneck. Nelson Cowan's 2001 review concluded true working memory capacity is about four chunks, not Miller's seven, once rehearsal and chunking are controlled for.
- Jan 27, 2026ConceptsEmotional Reasoning ExplainedEmotional reasoning treats a feeling as direct evidence about external reality, which is different from letting emotion guide reasoning. Damasio's patient Elliot had intact IQ and language but, stripped of emotional signals by ventromedial damage, could spend forty-five minutes choosing a lunch spot and wrecked his career and marriage. A two-stage method follows: name the feeling, then test it against evidence.
- Jan 26, 2026ConceptsWhy Awareness Does Not Remove BiasPronin, Lin and Ross found people rate themselves less biased than others while their actual bias scores bear no relation to that self-assessment, and Kahan's work found higher numeracy predicted stronger polarization, not less. What does move behavior is structure: Madrian and Shea found 401(k) participation among new employees at one firm rose from 37 percent to 86 percent purely by switching enrollment from opt-in to opt-out.
June 2025
November 2023
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