A Twitter thread by @G_S_Bhogal that will blow your mind. It is about 40 concepts you should know. Here's an extract. Enjoy!

1. Abstraction: There are scales of explanation. A human can be considered a person, mammal, collection of cells, collection of stardust. Sometimes people can't see eye to eye because they're unwittingly considering things at different levels of abstraction.

2. Scope Neglect: We evolved for the small scale of tribal life, so we can't comprehend the big numbers that recently entered human life. We can appreciate the difference between 50 and 100, but not a million and a billion. It's why we often treat geopolitics like family politics.

3. The Law of Very Large Numbers: Given a wide enough dataset, any pattern can be observed. A million to one odds happen eight times a day in NYC (population 8 million). The world hasn't become crazier; we're just seeing more of everything.

4. Benford's Law: Numbers in natural data sets are not uniformly distributed (e.g., 30% of numbers have one as their first digit). The IRS and other tax agencies use them to determine if you've lied about your finances.

5. Brandolini's Law (aka the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): It takes a lot more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. Hence, the world is full of unrefuted bullshit.

6. The Toxoplasma of Rage: The ideas that spread most are not those everyone agrees with, but those that divide people most because people see them as causes to attack or defend to signal their commitment to a tribe.

7. Network Effect: The more people use a network, the more valuable it becomes. A phone gains utility as more people use phones because more people can be called with it. It's why Twitter & Facebook are so dominant; we're stuck on these platforms because everyone else is.

8. The paradox of Abundance: Easy availability of food led to obesity for the masses but good health for the few who used the increased choice to avoid the mass-produced junk. Equally, you can prevent intellectual diabetes by ignoring junk info like gossip & clickbait.

9. Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. No matter the size of the task, it will often take precisely the amount of time you set aside to do it because more time means more deliberation & procrastination.

Check out the thread here

Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal

My peoples, the time has come for a MEGATHREAD. In 40 tweets I will explain another 40 concepts you should know. Strap in. Here we go:

September 17th 2021

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