Mental Model
False Consensus Effect (Ross, Greene & House)
The systematic tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share your beliefs, preferences, and behaviors
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Mental Model
False Dichotomy
Presenting a situation as having only two options when more exist—forcing a binary choice on a multi-option reality
Mental Model
False Negative
A test result that incorrectly indicates the absence of a condition—saying 'no' when the true answer is 'yes.' In medicine, a false negative means missing a disease that's actually present
Mental Model
False Positive
A test result that incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition—saying 'yes' when the true answer is 'no.' In medicine, a false positive means diagnosing a disease that isn't there
Mental Model
False Positives and False Negatives
False positives flag an absent condition, and false negatives miss a present condition
Mental Model
Falsifiability
Karl Popper's criterion for distinguishing science from non-science: a theory is scientific only if it makes predictions that could, in principle, be PROVEN WRONG by observation
Mental Model
Falsification / Confirmation Bias
A claim is meaningful and testable only if there exists some possible observation that could prove it wrong (Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion)
Cognitive Move
Falsifier and nondiagnostic result
State in advance what result would weaken your favorite theory and which results would tell you nothing.
Cognitive Move
familiar-object comparison
Put the amount beside a thing whose size the reader already carries, and draw both at honest proportion. Area for area, length for length. The comparison object has to come from the reader's own life, not from a stock list, or you have handed them a second quantity they cannot picture either.
Mental Model
Familismo (Extended Family Network)
Familismo is the Latin American cultural value system placing the extended family -- not the individual or nuclear family -- at the center of social, economic, and emotional life
Cognitive Move
Family Sort
Before comparing options, cluster them by their underlying mechanism or form so you compare families, not duplicates.
Cognitive Move
fan chart
A median path with nested bands around it, narrow for the middle of the range and wider for the tails. Width carries the meaning: a fan that stays thin says the next months look much like the last ones, and a fan that flares says one bad month early can move everything after it.
Cognitive Move
FAQ
The material broken into question-shaped entries, each self-contained, each phrased the way the reader would ask it. Anyone can enter at their own question and leave. What you give up is the through line: an FAQ cannot carry a turn, because no entry can know what the reader read first or whether they read anything else at all.
Mental Model
Fat Finger Error (Small Mistakes, Huge Consequences)
A small, often physical mistake—a mistyped number, a misplaced decimal, a clicked wrong button—that cascades into massive consequences because the system lacks safeguards proportionate to the consequences
Mental Model
Fat Tails
Fat-tail analysis examines distributions that assign relatively substantial probability to extreme outcomes
Mental Model
Fault Tree Analysis
Fault tree analysis (FTA) works backward from an undesirable event (the 'top event') to identify all possible combinations of component failures that could cause it
Cognitive Move
Favored explanation
Write down the story you already believe, stated as one specific testable claim and placed on the list as a candidate rather than the frame everything else gets judged against. Naming it out loud is what makes it beatable.
Mental Model
Fear as Adaptive Response
Fear evolved as a survival mechanism: a rapid-response system that prepares the body for threat through the fight-flight-freeze response
Mental Model
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
Fear of missing out is apprehension that others may be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, often accompanied by a desire to stay connected
Mental Model
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, often abbreviated FUD, names communication that raises apprehension about an option, commonly in competitive contexts
Cognitive Move
Feasible alternative
Judge the result against the realistic option you could actually have taken, given your money, time, and skill at the time. Not the ideal outcome, not zero effort, but the best real substitute that was on the table.
Cognitive Move
feasible region
Two quantities on the axes, each hard limit as a line, and the surviving area shaded. The shape of the region is the finding: a fat region means slack, a sliver means one more constraint kills the plan, and no region means something has to give.
Cognitive Move
Feast-Famine
A hypothesis that delayed replenishment and episodic use are alternating the system between excess and shortage.
Mental Model
Feature-Positive Effect
The cognitive bias where the presence of a feature is more noticeable and influential than its absence—we notice what IS there more readily than what ISN'T there