Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well. It’s why disentangling chance from skill is so difficult in everyday decisions: it’s a statistical undertaking, and one we are not normally equipped to deal with.
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Some of us imbue probability with emotion. It becomes luck: chance that has suddenly acquired a valence, positive or negative, fortuitous or unfortunate. Good or bad luck. A lucky or unlucky break. Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet — chance with an agenda. It was meant to be. Some even go a step further: predestination. It … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior
A basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive: our brains are simply not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty. There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment — just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior
Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
It’s the oldest story ever told. The story of belief — of the basic, irresistible, universal human need to believe in something that gives life meaning, something that reaffirms our view of ourselves, the world, and our place in it… For our minds are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them. Stories about our origins. Our … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (January 12, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Trust
Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history.
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The New Yorker (February 11, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts