Behavioral Economics: The Errors Point the Same Way
If people departed randomly from rational choice, the departures would cancel out. They lean consistently in the same directions — which is what makes them worth studying, and worth worrying about.
Concept
The Base Rate Fallacy
History: The Past and the Account of It Are Different Things
Every account is assembled from what survived, by someone who already knows the ending. That single fact makes events look more inevitable than they were — and explains why careful history sounds less certain.
Benford's Law: Why So Many Numbers Start With One
Around thirty per cent of numbers in real datasets begin with 1, and only five per cent with 9. People inventing figures don't reproduce that — which is how the pattern became an auditing tool.
The Fermi Paradox: A Very Large, Very Quiet Universe
Billions of stars, billions of years, and enough time for anyone to have crossed the galaxy several times over. We see nothing — and every explanation for that says something significant.
Simpson's Paradox: True in Every Group, False Overall
A treatment beats its rival for small stones, beats it for large stones, and loses when you combine the patients. Nothing was miscalculated — which is what makes it worth understanding.
Longevity and Health: The Big Effects Are the Ones Nobody Sells
The interventions with the largest effects have been known for decades and are unglamorous. Attention flows almost inversely to effect size, for a simple reason — the big ones cannot be sold.
The Base Rate Fallacy: Start With How Common It Is
The quiet, bookish stranger sounds like a librarian. There are a hundred times more salespeople — so the shy ones alone outnumber every librarian in the country.
Bayes' Theorem: The 99% Accurate Test That Is Wrong 91% of the Time
A rare disease, a 99% accurate test, a positive result — and roughly a 9% chance you're ill. The gap comes from one number most people leave out entirely.
Survivorship Bias: The Bullet Holes That Weren't There
Wartime analysts mapped damage on returning bombers and proposed armouring the places full of holes. A statistician pointed out those were the survivable hits — and inverted the entire dataset.
Regression to the Mean: The Jinx That Is Just Arithmetic
Praise a great performance and the next is worse; criticise a bad one and the next improves. A flight instructor learned this lesson over years of observation — and it was never about motivation.