Nov 19, 2025
Mental Shortcuts: How Heuristics Shape Our Worldview
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Mental Shortcuts: How Heuristics Shape Our Worldview
Let's be honest. You think you're a rational person. When you sit down to study for that big exam or make a life-altering decision like choosing a major, you believe you're weighing all the evidence logically. But what if I told you that your brain has a secret life? It’s…
In today's interconnected world, understanding human behavior is crucial. Whether navigating personal relationships, professional environments, or casual interactions, our connections deepen when we grasp why people behave as they do.
LLMs are like slot machines, in that an incorrect answer (the slot machine eating your dollar) is unremarkable, while the LLM solving a problem (a jackpot) is amazing, and the latter stands out in your memory, causing you to overestimate the reliability of LLMs.
If you put ten minutes into writing a prompt, and Mallory gives a completely off-the-rails, useless answer, and you lose ten minutes, well, that’s just what using a computer is like sometimes. Mallory malfunctioned, or hallucinated, but it does that sometimes, everybody knows that. You only wasted ten minutes. It’s fine. Not a big deal. Let’s try it a few more times. Just ten more minutes. It’ll probably work this time.
If you put ten minutes into writing a prompt, and it completes a task that would have otherwise taken you 4 hours, that feels amazing. Like the computer is magic! An absolute endorphin rush.
Very memorable. When it happens, it feels like P=1.
-Glyph, The Futzing Fraction
The Media's Role in Making Trump a Viable Acceptable Candidate: the Mere Exposure Effect, Availability Heuristic, and Confirmation Bias
Reading time: 6 minutes Given that Trump led the 6 January Insurrection and that his sheer incompetence in the pandemic killed a million people, how could he be considered an acceptable and viable candidate by anyone but fascists much less the media?
SUMMARY: This post explores how cognitive biases and heuristics—specifically the mere exposure effect, availability heuristic, and confirmation bias—shape media narratives surrounding Trump. It highlights how repeated exposure to false claims can distort perceptions, leading both the public and reporters to accept these lies as truth. The post emphasizes that journalists, under pressure to meet…
Book of the Day -
Today’s Book of the Day is Thinking, Fast and Slow, written by Daniel Kahneman in 2013 and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist whose main research topics have been the psychology of judgment and decision-making, and behavioural economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L.…
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The Framing Effect Explains the Difference Between Knowingly Committing a Crime and Knowing the Election was Stolen in the Media
Why are reporters and pundits insisting that a conviction of Trump in the election case rests on whether Trump knew he was lying or not? Are they idiots? Are they useful idiots? Or are they victims of the framing effect?
SUMMARY: In the media, we are hearing many reporters and pundits saying that the government will have a difficult time proving whether Trump knew he was lying or not. And, that the case against Trump depends on this determination. This idea is patently false, but it has become so prevalent that it seems like common sense now. Why would so many make such a fundamental error? The framing effect…
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If someone you know gets sick from taking a flu shot, you will be less likely to get one even if it is statistically safe. In fact, if you see a story on the news about someone dying from the flu shot, that one isolated case could be enough to keep you away from the vaccine forever. On the other hand, if you hear a news story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.
David McRaney