Mental Model Cobra Effect | At the time of British rule of colonial India, the British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi and so it offered a bounty for every dead cobra. The policy initially appeared successful. Eventually, however, the number of dead cobras being presented for bounty payment began […]
Mental Model Representativeness Heuristic | Consider the following: Linda is 31, bright, single, and outspoken. She majored in philosophy at the university. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social injustice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Is it more likely that Laura works at a bank? Or, is it more […]
His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British Museum reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently […]
His daily schedule then looked something like this. He got up at 5:00 A.M. His servant Martin Lampe, who worked for him from at least 1762 until 1802, would wake him. The old soldier was under orders to be persistent, so that Kant would not sleep longer. Kant was proud that he never got up […]
Mental Model Braess’s Paradox | An observation by German mathematician Dietrich Braess who noticed that adding a road to a particular congested road traffic network would make traffic worse due to an increase in shortcuts becoming popular and overcrowded. Trend Micro Weddings | Google searches for “micro wedding” (defined as <50 guests) hit an all-time high in […]
One of Newton’s employees took note of the physicist’s habits in the 1680s, observing that Newton rarely went to bed before 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and sometimes not until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m.—and yet, “In a Morning he seem’d to be as much refresh’d with his few hours Sleep, as though he had […]