Anchoring Effect

Organized advocacy disguised as spontaneous, independent public support.

Over-trusting an automated recommendation, including against available contrary evidence.

Judging how likely or common something is by how easily examples come to mind, not by actual frequency.

judging a specific case from vivid evidence while discounting how common the categories actually are.

Fraud that obtains trust first, so the victim hands over the money themselves.

The tendency to search for, interpret, and recall evidence in ways that favor what you already believe.

Low skill removes the very ability needed to recognize low skill, inflating self-assessment most at the bottom.

Reaching a defensible order-of-magnitude answer by decomposing a question into estimable factors.

Words reshaped to resemble familiar parts, and the false origin stories that reshaping invites.

Zero-price entry monetized after the fact, with design that bends toward whoever is willing to pay.

Selling randomized draws rather than items, and the structures that make the real price hard to see.

When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

A cohesive group suppresses its own doubts to preserve unanimity, and makes a worse decision as a result.

A claim feels more true the more times you've heard it, independent of any evidence for it.

The time spent debating an item is inversely proportional to its actual stakes.

A misheard phrase reanalyzed into something else that still makes sense, most often from song lyrics.

Defending a modest claim while trading on a bolder one made under the same name.

The range of political positions treated as acceptable to hold at a given moment.

The unit of an absolute change in a percentage, and the gap between that and a relative change.

Shaping a model's input to make the desired behavior reliable rather than occasional.

A clue or argument that draws attention away from the real question, used deliberately by mystery writers and magicians, slipped into debates as a fallacy of relevance, and met by accident in every investigation that chases the wrong suspect.

Local anesthetic placed around a nerve or plexus to interrupt conduction from a whole region, and the rebound that follows.

The two error rates of a test, and why neither answers the question a person actually asks.

A dice-plus-modifier resolution borrowed from tabletop play to decide whether an attempted action succeeds.

A control that sets a value by dragging a handle along a track, borrowed from the faders of audio equipment, ideal for adjusting something approximate with instant feedback and poor for entering an exact number.

Constraining a model to emit data conforming to a declared schema rather than free text.

Continuing an effort because of what has already been spent on it, rather than what remains to be gained.

The experimental claim that reminders of death increase defense of one's worldview and self-esteem.

A community-authored ordinal ranking of a game's options, and what the ranking actually measures.

A design in which the scarce resource is the schedule itself, so every activity is paid for with another left undone.

How bodies chemically dispose of foreign compounds, and why those pathways differ enough between species to make one animal's food another's poison.