Something that is false, yet human brains may inevitably act according to it anyway.
It may be a side effect of biological determinism, where old things used to work, but since the world suddenly changed quite a lot in the last 100 years or so, some traits may not be applicable anymore
(and sometimes it’s not)
Continuing to spend just because you have spent a lot on it.
Eg., casino! Or other useless activities.
It more than likely leads to bankruptcy. Just because you failed 10 times in a row doesn’t change the probability for the next 10 slot plays because machines don’t feel sorry; they want to profit the casino. Casinos straight up abuse such psychology for their own benefit
Or people binge-watch shows or movies until the end because they already paid for it, even if it bores them to the core.
HOWEVER, sometimes, it is indeed better to continue a sunk cost because otherwise you would just give up halfway through everything, and starting over can cost more energy and time relative to something you already started.
In the education system: One ambiguous case is when you take a subject you don't like and later regret. Will you switch subjects or schools in the middle of the year? Or will you have thought it out, since the remaining amount of content is less than if you were to take a new subject? Alternatively, there is an option of redoing the school year, but the opportunity cost is very high. Overall, it may be better to stay, even though the human brain will reject it a bit.
Describing some properties of water, such as the ability to accelerate rust and cause drowning, often calls for it to be banned, regulated strictly or labelled as a hazardous chemical. The motivation behind the parody is to play into chemophobia, misplacing fear! The main cause is Fear of Chemical Names - the bias that chemicals are dangerous, and also being biased that they only hear a certain chemical is contained in horrible things while ignoring the very important uses of it.
Things are taking longer than you plan - constantly - yet your brain refuses to accept this!
This can occur frequently.
Give yourself x3 the time. When planning, have blocks of empty space that can be filled by whatever took longer than expected… Or as an alternative, you can just use a Tasklist instead of forcing yourself to do certain things at certain times because your brain may decide that it needs sleep, or may want to switch the order around, etc. But beware: Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.
This is also linked to Parkinson's law where work expands to fill its time for completion, and then adversities may be ignored, like time needed for debugging in programming.) This is why things being finished earlier than expected are so rare, while lateness is common.
This also is linked to the fact human brains naturally care more about the short-term, as they only feel their present state.
For instance, limited luxury goods (or even Pokémon cards), prices go
up with lower supply, and even more if they are unique or niche. This
happens because humans have FOMO (Fear of missing out). Sometimes, this can be natural,
like with RAM (AI consumes
so much RAM supply these days).
However, just because it's scarce does not mean you need it, or you will
even want it for any reason other than the novelty. It may not reflect the
actual value some of the time.
This is unless, well, you think you can re-sell it at higher prices. For
instance, one guy bought lots of Kabuto (iirc) Pokémon Cards, to the
point the demand went sky-high so he could clearly sell them for much
higher prices (despite the community not really liking this). Or if you
want to gain followers on social media (by "ragebait")
Try to recognize whether your decisions are fallacies or not. In this case,
even though businesses try to trick you into buying it, try to think,
"once the hype dies down, does this have any practical value"? If not,
it's sad, and even if you resell it, you would likely lose money! One more point is
that even for luxury goods, it's still win-win because one profits and
the other gets what he or she wants.
Scarcity is still real. Now I have nothing against businesses trying to
influence purchases by scarcity; they are just being clever! Demand,
price, supply... It's like economics.
The idea that good receives good and bad receives bad. Not
necessarily true. Rather, there is a media bias that only addresses things that
are like that, as otherwise the brain would be confused.
There was one psychology experiment of one normal person being
electrocuted, and a crowd was unable to intervene. Slowly over time, the
crowd falsely thought he had done something really bad.
For instance, a brain
that goes through schools will try to think of reasons why it's good!
Including adults! Because it's painful to think that bad things can
happen for no reason.
And this is the most damaging for things that are totally out of control
yet cause suffering, like certain mental or physical health
deficits. People try to invent reasons, like the idea that pain builds
resilience, due to the cognitive dissonance of seeing that
there can be bad without good. In fact, the argument that stress builds
resilience is only the case when it is not chronic (i.e. not lasting a
whole life!), but the problem is that the people without it are still
ahead and don't have to suffer as much.
Where innocent people was electroduced (at least acting it out) for no reason. The audience degraded the person even though he did absolutely nothing wrong! In another case, when the person was said to recieve compensation, audience attitudes got better. Audience expect karma in a chaotic reality when bad can strike the good and vice versa.
Victim-blaming and cognitive dissonance.
Teachers may be nice, classmates may be natural, I may be hedonic, no anti-darwin evil genes anywhere. Yet world is still unfair. This is exactly it!
Nothing has meaning, finding meaning for meaningless events (e.g. bad get rewarded) is futile, yet you must live it anyways
The cosmos will refuse to provide any fairness
Darwinism loves fairness and wants to fight bad with anger when it is not - but most things nowadays cannot be fought back anymore due to authority power and anti-abuse laws.
It is mostly social karma but then this occurs if you generalize it to everything else in life which it mostly is not - or it was Darwinism yet again in which tribal group survival was even more important!
Most of the feelings of anger, or hatred likely come from this - not having a detachment of expectations v.s. reality.
Teachers may be nice, classmates may be natural, I may be hedonic, no anti-Darwin evil genes anywhere. Yet the world is still unfair. The systems and their inerta are very strong. In such a situation one may not know how to blame - so until they realize that the world was never supposed to be non-chaotic even if the people have good intentions (as it is unlike reality) - they might be unable to explain how they truly feel.
Don't try to enlighten it into the fact of "lack of responsibility", for instance for a person that was struck by a rock often he is still responsible for paying money.
This is mostly due to the education system. Teachers, and even some
parents, think that it is too distracting. In reality, for boring
lessons, "anything" is better than it, and since humans rely
[[psychologically] on pleasure, they end up surfing the web. In the view
of schools, they would be labeled "problematic". In my eyes, I would
label them "natural"! The education system relies on an outdated
Prussian model (which is like a factory).
However, there are so many convenient tools, even for learning, that I cannot live
without technology. You can try... the "detox"... I wouldn't recommend
this, though. Reliance is due to a sense of inferiority and is not a
sign of a problem on its own. For example, flashcard apps like Anki and SuperMemo can
enhance human memory so much more than teachers' teachings (of course,
do not memorize before you understand at least a little, though there is
a defense for memorization...), paper
tests, or even the Lietner system (ultra-inconvenient in comparison),
technology helps repetitions, which helps me (and other students) as a
human. Perhaps this was related to: The above is merely a fallacy that
can potentially be related to media bias. See also: Technology bias
Attacking the human who is making the arguments (possibly their reputation or fame) instead of the arguments themselves. Usually, indeed, it’s a fallacy, as even celebrities or politicians speak out lies about others. In a proper debate, this should not be the case. Try to avoid it in real life too, because it makes people less likely to like you and less logical, please.
Mathematically, the probability of two things being true at the same
time is always less than or equal to the probability of just one of them
being true.
Statement 1 (A): He is a writer. Statement 2 (A AND B): He is a writer,
AND he studied English in primary school.
Every single person who fits description #2 also fits description #1.
But not everyone in #1 fits #2 (some writers might have been
homeschooled or studied a different language first). Therefore, the
probability of #1 is always higher than or equal to #2.
In logic, more
details mean more ways to prove wrong, yet psychologically, a source
having more details means a more trustworthy or observant source due to
less likelihood of fabrication.
You notice only when aware!
You forgot the first car license plate number you saw today.
But you probably do remember some big good or bad event that changed
your life! This comes from the fact that if it is in your mind, it is
more difficult to forget and likely more important to you, leading you
to notice more when you are aware of a topic. This is expected.
However, the whole reason this is a fallacy is that it leads to
overestimation or underestimation of how much you have seen something
just by how familiar it looks to you!
See: Correlation is not necessarily causation
This often occurs due to sampling bias, where you apply isolated example(s) to a much larger demographic. For instance, the most common version is trusting what influencers say; for instance, them saying society is stupid and only giving an extremely small number of examples, when most of the people aren’t even involved in his/her argument (this is because they prioritize views and brevity over detailed information due to attention spans)
Another one is when you apply what you have seen to another demographic that has differences. For instance, when you apply what Western philosophies you have heard to Chinese locations, you might think that the Chinese are stupid because they sacrifice individuality. Or you apply what you have heard from teenagers to adult life. This leads to an inconclusive effect and an invalid generalization. To be fair, most people are indeed strangers, and you don’t know much about them. However, DON’T say something like “the whole world is stupid” because that’s just a ridiculous and false overgeneralization.
Where knowing is often not enough for change; for instance, telling someone about the harms of doomscrolling or gambling... they would often continue their old habits, and their old psychology still exists. Usually... perhaps this is determinism at its finest. Scary!
You cannot expect Perfection. It is a TRAP by Modern Culture! (You
can, but it does not end well.)
You will always sway a bit to Plans.
For the nature of perfection has no interest in anyone and may not grasp
or understand circumstances (or even know them!)
Perfection, statistically, is almost impossible, with every single thing
you to maintain perfection is humanly impossible.
A perfect score on a test is possible, but only on a lucky day, because it's a finite subset of knowledge out of a finite syllabus. But pragmatically, you cannot know everything you wish to know!...
You can dream. I will allow for dreams. However, expect a bit of deviation. Deviation is part of life. Yet for the Perfectionist, one deviation spells the end, so acceptance is healthier!
Another problem results from the fact that being traumatized by school, the perfectionist is terrified of trying new things which may stagnate their skills, creativity, or knowledge. It's not good that school implies the sense of grades - the ones starting out may be devaluing themselves because of that, even when new information is usually good, because it's like "committing to and taking a subject" even in reality you can "drop out" any time and don't have to follow any syllabus whatsoever. School admissions by definition would have the metric become the only target, not the other goals of learning, as such the entire system now revolves around very high scores, and thus attacking the fundamental heuristic of trial and error, which is so damaging by imposing the fear of failure.
Just because one is good does not mean another is bad. And just because one is bad does not mean the other is good. For instance, both prison and school can be hell, but some may argue that prison lasts longer and the conditions are tougher, so it's bad. However, this still does not mean school is a paradise at all; it may be better, but it's still bad for stress, sleep, and the human will for freedom.
Linked to the just world fallacy above! After losing a lot, you expect to win, right? WRONG! Mathematically independent. You feel like you "deserve" a win, but math has no knowledge of the past.
Alternatively, gamblers may gamble because they vividly remember the one time they won a lot of money. This is the peak-end bias. One of the times that the peak feels stronger than the ends (of potential bankruptcy, expected case with tons of attempts).
This is also linked to heuristics in that small probabilities are imagined far more likely than in reality to occur.
And casinos also have lots of gamification. To the point that some older videogames literally have casinos in them! No wonder they are such a profitable business...
Rarer, but after you win, you feel like you expended all your good luck. Wrong again! Equally likely to win next time. Rather, you might feel like you want to transfer your luck to "a better time" because there were worse situations that may have needed more boost (but this obviously is impossible).
Where the conclusion changes nothing; for instance, for the education system, saying that it's only temporary does not change the fact that pain is real.
You follow the group: conformity in hopes they have a high chance to be right - sometimes is, sometimes isn't. What's tricky about fallacies is that it helped in darwinism but advantages might have been lost in outragerous social media era and such. Try to think carefully, but admitedly, sometimes the conformity senses are so strong that the counter is a wide variety of perspectives.
Where your time management assumes you are a perfectly logical human machine, and that you need less breaks than you really need, and that you can follow a routine without getting bored easily.
You can always plan around the optimal. However, due to possible circumstances, it would almost always not be optimal. Mental states, disruptions, fatigue - these are very common things that can disrupt a "perfect" plan!
For instance, forgetting about the pains of the past and failing to sympathize at all with the sufferers of a newer generation. This is in hindsight where the path appaers more straightforward than, you guessed it, their brains! Your brain forgot the boredom and selectively kept the good and the easy to report.