ONE OF SEVEN WAYS OF SEEING
Make useful decisions when time and information are limited.
The ultimate test of understanding is whether you can convey a concept to someone with zero prior knowledge. If you cannot teach it to a child, you have not yet grasped the idea. You need to learn more about it.
Five techniques (paraphrase, 180 degrees, broaden focus, redirect focus, ask why) to restate problems, opening up new perspectives and uncovering overlooked issues.
Erikson describes disagreements in work groups and families as a source of stress for people he calls Greens, whom he presents as conflict-averse.
Organize observations and ideas into a coherent narrative to create a mental model and deepen understanding. Use analogies, emotion, and vivid language to make explanations engaging and memorable.
A lateral thinking technique that uses repeated 'why' questions to challenge accepted explanations and encourage restructuring of thought patterns, often by refusing to be satisfied with conventional answers.
A technique for challenging assumptions by repeatedly asking 'why' even when you know the answer, focusing on familiar terms until no explanation seems obvious.
Galloway looks for pressing problems an organization has given up trying to solve. Her approach is to start with a small effort, test new approaches, and recruit help as the work becomes clearer.
When evaluating search results, step back to see the overall pattern (gestalt) of the page to understand the information neighborhood and who controls it, rather than focusing on individual results. This heuristic, known as click restraint, helps avoid wasting time on unreliable sources.
In any field, 90% of work is crap (Sturgeon's Law), so focus on the good 10%. In philosophy, this means engaging with classics and quality secondary literature, but also understanding the context to appreciate the good stuff.
A perceptual heuristic where the brain automatically interprets a 2-D image as a 3-D scene, causing a bias in size judgment. Objects that appear more distant are perceived as larger on the page, leading to predictable errors.
The 5 Whys is a root cause analysis technique developed by Toyota to repeatedly ask 'why' to uncover the underlying causes of problems. The three-way five whys extends this by investigating prevention, detection, and recovery failures.
The affect heuristic is the use of positive or negative feelings to judge risks and benefits. Liking an activity can make its benefits seem greater and its risks smaller. In Kahneman’s account, System 2 may defend System 1’s emotional judgments instead of examining them.
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where people judge the frequency or probability of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. This often leads to systematic biases because factors other than actual frequency (e.g., salience, recency, personal experience) influence ease of recall.
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where people judge the frequency or probability of events based on how easily examples come to mind. However, the ease of retrieval (fluency) often dominates the number of instances, leading to paradoxical effects where asking for more examples can reduce confidence or reverse judgments.
An acceptable option may still have a better alternative. Before settling, consider whether the choices offered leave out a way to obtain the same benefit with fewer drawbacks.
Practise critical thinking through repeated checks of sources, evidence, and assumptions. Familiarity with these checks can make them easier to use in everyday decisions.
Taking a friend’s or observer’s perspective can help you reconsider an emotionally charged decision and identify the priorities you want it to serve.
In de Bono’s model, holding a problem and an unrelated input in attention encourages connections between them. A random word or image can suggest an analogy, a new starting point, or a different arrangement of familiar ideas.
The equivalent bet test expresses confidence in a belief by comparing it with a gamble whose odds are known. Adjust those odds until the bets feel equally attractive. The result is an estimate of your confidence; checking whether it is calibrated requires comparing predictions with outcomes.
Richard Feynman kept a master notebook of topics he lacked knowledge about, organizing his learning and improving comprehension by explaining material to himself as if teaching another. This method helps maintain curiosity, focus, and clarity in self-directed learning.
A heuristic for data visualization and communication that combines Richard Feynman's ability to simplify complex ideas with Edward Tufte's principles of clear, intense design: a visual display should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van.
The Gift Model compares a gift’s cost with how much the recipient values it. Its authors offer two rules of thumb: be generous and favor experiences over material gifts.
The Golden Rule is a universal ethical principle found across cultures and religions, advocating that one should treat others as one wishes to be treated. It is a fundamental moral guideline in both personal and professional contexts.
Taking action despite negligible probability of success can be rational if the potential payoff is high, as illustrated by Spock's distress signal leading to rescue.
The laws of sympathetic magic are cognitive heuristics comprising the law of contagion (once in contact, always in contact) and the law of similarity (like causes like or appearance equals reality). They promote beliefs contrary to science yet persist in modern thinking, often with strong affective components.
Humans minimize cognitive energy by using mental shortcuts (heuristics) that often lead to 'good enough' rather than optimal decisions. These shortcuts are both learned from experience and innate, and they can be managed by considering base rates and information quality.
Evaluate an argument’s reasoning and its premises separately. For a deductive argument, check whether the conclusion follows, then whether the premises are true. A valid argument with a false premise is unsound; an inductive argument needs an appropriately qualified conclusion.
A heuristic that uses a matrix to organize and analyze data, making it easier to spot correlations and solve logic puzzles.
A strategic heuristic emphasizing that while both the moon and stars are in the sky, they are distinct. In any endeavor, if one technique fails, switch to another rather than persisting with a failing approach.
When others' behavior seems irrational, instead of dismissing them, treat confusion as a clue to uncover missing information. This is a key principle in negotiation.
Taleb describes muting television pundits to reduce the influence of their delivery. He finds their expressions less intimidating without sound, using one bias to counter his tendency to take the commentary seriously.
The ordinary language test asks you to explain a claim in your own words instead of repeating unfamiliar terms. It can expose gaps in understanding and labels that conceal a missing explanation. Evaluating whether the claim is true also requires examining its evidence and reasoning.
Asking 'why' can expose assumptions, distinguish a definition from an explanation, and reveal circular reasoning. A useful answer depends on what the questioner wants to understand and which background facts both people accept.
Principles for facilitating complex environments within the Cynefin framework, emphasizing avoiding pattern entrainment, designing for distributed cognition, enabling descriptive self-awareness, and ensuring ambiguity. The facilitator role is to apply light-touch heuristics and system-level changes rather than directing content.
Erikson describes Reds as focused on the current goal, speed and directness. His communication advice is to prepare the agenda, answer questions precisely and let the other person’s response guide how much small talk to include.
Representativeness judgments can favor a close match to a stereotype over base rates or the rule that a conjunction cannot be more probable than either component. The passage examines why such errors sometimes persist even when relevant cues are explicit. It distinguishes consistency across a person’s beliefs from the ability to reason correctly with information currently in view, and considers competing interpretations of the experiments.
The representativeness heuristic is the cognitive shortcut of judging the likelihood of something based on how similar it is to a prototype or how much a cause resembles its effect. While often useful, it can lead to errors when instances do not match the prototype or when causes and effects are disproportionate.
The reversal method is a lateral thinking technique that involves taking a situation and turning it around (upside down, inside out, back to front) to generate new perspectives and ideas. It uses the existing situation as a starting point to move in the opposite direction, helping to overcome creative blocks.
Grant recommends finding common ground, presenting a few strong reasons, and asking questions during disagreement. He uses negotiation research and his own mistakes to show how a forceful argument can provoke resistance.
A Stop Rule sets a condition for ending or revising a course of action in advance: for example, selling after a 10% investment loss or turning back from a climb at a set time. It can reduce repeated deliberation and help enforce a limit.
A flexible combat strategy emphasizing constant changes in attack direction to confuse the enemy, combined with a warrior's mindset of absolute destruction.
Parrish offers two complementary ways to manage weaknesses: develop strengths through practice and use safeguards where effort alone is unreliable or cannot remove a limitation. Safeguards can support both learned habits and biological limits.
The passage labels a feminine style of appearance and behavior the ultra-girl strategy and interprets it through the halo effect. The account relies on gender stereotypes and public personas; it does not establish the motives of individual women or what all men prefer.
A decision-making heuristic that uses a set of clear yes/no questions to quickly evaluate options, particularly under time pressure and risk. It relies on predefined parameters to simplify complex choices.
The book proposes taking a break when deliberate analysis stalls. Its coin-toss exercise uses your reaction to an imagined outcome to explore preferences; that reaction is one input to a decision, not proof of which option is best.
Some payoffs depend more on favourable extremes than on the average. Taleb uses enthusiastic readers and wealthy luxury buyers to illustrate how greater dispersion can help when gains are retained and losses are limited.
This heuristic advises simplifying complex problems to their simplest form to gain clarity and insight, then gradually adding complexity as needed. It echoes Occam's razor and the KISS principle, emphasizing that most problems have core, tractable elements.
Test an idea at an extreme value or under an extreme assumption. The result can expose a mistaken answer, clarify how a concept works, or reveal a decision’s limits. Best- and worst-case scenarios are one use of this heuristic.
Third-person self-talk uses your name or third-person pronouns to describe your own situation. This can create enough distance to examine a stressful experience and choose a response.
A thought experiment is a technique to detect motivated reasoning by imagining how you would reason in a counterfactual scenario where your motivations were different. It involves vividly imagining the alternative scenario to observe your genuine reaction.
A combat heuristic from Miyamoto Musashi describing the three critical times to shout in battle: before engaging to unsettle the enemy, during each attack to maintain spirit, and after defeating an opponent to solidify victory and release tension.
Act quickly when a decision is cheap to reverse (ASAP). For consequential decisions that are costly to undo, use the available time to learn while weighing the cost of delay (ALAP). Stop gathering information when it no longer helps, waiting would cost an opportunity, or the evidence makes the choice clear (Stop-FLOP-Know).
Taleb discusses removing retreat options as a way to force commitment. His historical stories illustrate the tactic, while the choice also raises the question of what is lost by giving up alternatives.
A heuristic for attacking the weak spots in an opponent's defenses, gradually wearing them down until a decisive strike is possible.
Organizations can have too much information to assess comfortably and too little useful knowledge to guide a decision. Management slogans may offer tempting shortcuts, while collecting more data may add noise. The task is to assess evidence, analyze it competently, and connect the findings to a specific decision.
Trial and error becomes a systematic search when results tell you where to look next. Taleb uses a lost wallet and a shipwreck search to show how ruling out possibilities can make an unsuccessful attempt informative.
Instead of finding natural components of a situation, create artificial divisions to provoke new arrangements and generate novel ideas. This lateral thinking technique prevents the mind from reassembling parts into the original pattern.
To engage in truthseeking with people outside your group, use strategies like expressing uncertainty, leading with assent (using 'and' instead of 'but'), asking for temporary agreement, and focusing on the future to reduce defensiveness and encourage open discussion.
Taleb uses the Lindy effect as a reading heuristic: work that has remained useful over time has survived a filter that newly hyped work has yet to face. He recommends giving lasting books and results more attention when choosing what to read.
A heuristic for maintaining a constant set of important unsolved problems, allowing the mind to make unexpected connections and synthesize ideas over time, as exemplified by Richard Feynman and Stephen King.