1. Cunningham's Law:
The best way to find the right answer online is not to ask the right question, but to post the wrong answer.
Why? Because people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them.
2. Lindy effect:
The life of perishable things like food decreases with age.
But the life of nonperishable things, such as ideas, increases with age.
The ideas that are most likely to exist 1000 years from now are the ideas that already existed 1000 years ago.
3. Dunning-Kruger effect:
People with little knowledge in any area often overestimate their competence compared to more experienced experts.
American Idol was a great example of amateurs overestimating their singing ability.
4. Confirmation Bias:
We demand extremely strong evidence for ideas that do not fit our beliefs, and accept extremely weak evidence for ideas that do.
5. Hick's Law
The effort required to make a decision increases with the number of options.
The more options you offer, the more difficult it is for customers to make a decision.
This is why most companies are now building products with fewer options.
6. Streisand Effect:
In some cases, trying to kill an idea can paradoxically lead to it becoming popular instead.
Banned books and music albums, which become popular precisely because they were banned, are the best-known examples of this effect.
7. Lure Effect:
Asymmetric numbers can influence our perception of what is acceptable.
This is how movie theaters sell more popcorn: by artificially raising the price of the middle option, they make the largest option more attractive.
8. Luxury Beliefs:
Beliefs that give status to the upper class while the lower class bears the cost.
Example: an elite that supports abolishing the police while living in a private gated community, leaving poorer neighborhoods to suffer the consequences.
9. Brandolini's law:
The amount of effort required to debunk disinformation is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of effort required to create it.
This is why misinformation is so widespread on the Internet.
10. Cultural parasitism:
The ideas and beliefs most widely held in society are those most likely to be passed on to others, not those most likely to be true.
Fake news is an example of an idea that spreads very quickly despite being false.
11. Motivation Bias:
Strong rewards can cause people to accept incorrect or false beliefs.
"It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it." — Upton Sinclair
12. Reciprocity Bias:
We feel obligated to repay the people who have done us a favor.
Example: When waiters give away free mints along with the bill, customers' tips are increased by 14%.
13. Desire to imitate:
People have a desire to be more like their idols by copying them.
Here's why athletes like LeBron and Ronaldo get paid so much to wear Nikes:
People think they can be more like their idols if they wear what they wear.
14. Risk aversion:
We often hesitate to buy because we hate the thought that we can buy something and then regret it.
That's why companies like Netflix offer free trials - to neutralize our risk aversion.
15. Uncertainty aversion:
People are more concerned about the uncertainty of waiting than about how long it lasts.
That's why you see countdown clocks at traffic lights.
That is why the food delivery app tells you the estimated delivery time.
16. Social Proof:
When people don't know how to behave, they will blindly copy what everyone else is doing.
This is how smoking spread among women in the US - advertisers paid female models to smoke at public events.
17. Striving for Status:
When choosing between two options, people often choose the one that enhances their social status—even if that option is very costly.
Example: People are willing to pay $2,500 for a branded bag even if the functionality is identical to a $250 bag.
18. Evolutionary mismatch:
Humans developed in scarcity but now live in abundance.
Therefore, it is difficult for us to resist what is abundant today, but was scarce in the past, such as sugar and drugs.
This evolutionary mismatch is the cause of many problems such as obesity and drug addiction.
19. Metcalfe's Law:
The value of a network increases as the number of users of that network increases.
This is how social networks work: the more friends you have using the application, the more likely you are to join and use this application.
20. Fredkin's paradox:
The more similar two options are, the more difficult it is to decide between them.
You will spend much more time choosing between Honda and Toyota than choosing between Honda and Ferrari.
Based thread: love mushroom
