People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
Set the goal as finding something you do not yet have a candidate for. Not testing which of three known options wins, but searching until a viable pattern, problem, or option surfaces at all. Success is a found thing plus a search budget.
This framework distinguishes two fundamentally different approaches to health: disease prevention (reducing the probability of specific negative outcomes) and health promotion (building positive capacities and well-being…
Kenneth Doka's concept of disenfranchised grief describes losses that are real but socially unrecognized—grief that is not openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported
Two competing theories of aging have shaped policy and practice for decades
Munger's mirror of liking/loving tendency: the tendency to distort reality in negative directions when you dislike someone
Dilts's facilitation model uses Dreamer, Realist, and Critic perspectives to generate possibilities, plan implementation, and examine weaknesses.
The investor behavior of selling winning investments too early (locking in gains to avoid the pain of watching them reverse) and holding losing investments too long (avoiding the pain of realizing a loss)
The systematically irrational pattern of selling winning investments too early (to 'lock in gains') and holding losing investments too long (to 'avoid realizing losses')
A theory of a particular competitive process in which an entrant begins with overlooked, overserved, or previously unserved users and may improve toward more demanding markets
Ilya Prigogine's Nobel Prize-winning insight that systems far from equilibrium can spontaneously generate new order by dissipating energy—chaos at one level produces organization at a higher level
The systematic error of overvaluing differences between options when comparing them side-by-side, which leads to choosing options whose advantages are noticeable during comparison but imperceptible during actual use
Identify how your test could be distorted, by confounding, selection, expectancy, gaming, or peeking, and design against it.
Recast the thing as a spread across many cases rather than one fixed value. You stop asking what it is and start asking how it varies: the range, the subgroups, the tails, how often each outcome shows up. New operations become sampling, comparing, and betting.
Find out how the outcome is spread across cases and what usually happens before judging any single case.
Check how gains and losses land across people and time instead of trusting the total.
Evaluate how outcomes vary across people, cases, or scenarios, with special attention to the worst-served and the rare severe tail.
Ask where you sit in the whole spread, not against one summary number. Look at the range, the subgroups inside it, the tails, and how it shifts over time. A single average hides how much variation is normal.
Distributional shape describes how values are spread, including center, dispersion, skew, tails, and possible modes
Distributive justice concerns allocation of benefits and burdens; procedural justice concerns how decisions are made
Name the actual shocks the thing must survive, and how long each one lasts. Not "life gets busy" but specific, sized events with a stated duration, so you can tell whether your protection is built for the real worst case or a comfortable imaginary one.
Before looking at the result, lock in what each rival explanation predicts you will see.
Divergent thinking explores possibilities; convergent thinking narrows, evaluates, and develops them
Diversification combines exposures to reduce dependence on particular sources of loss
An exact decomposition of aggregate squared prediction error into average individual squared error minus prediction variance.