Reading Time: < 1 minConfirmation bias is becoming an increasingly large problem in our world, and the vast amounts of data at our fingertips is making it worse. Confirmation bias is generally thought of as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.” In other […]
Learning
Good versus “must listen” podcasts
Reading Time: 2 minI was looking in my podcast app today and discovered that I’m subscribed to 41 shows. Episodes pour in every week, but I don’t have time to listen to anywhere near all of them. I’ve realized that I’ve essentially put my podcasts into two categories: Those that I listen to every episode. Those that I […]
A big circle of darkness
Reading Time: 2 minWhen I was helping to host WordCamp Atlanta a few years ago, we had a “developer day” and asked users during registration to rate their WordPress development abilities as either “Beginner”, “Intermediate”, or “Expert”. When I was reading through the registrations, two came up in a row that were both marked “Intermediate”, and I was […]
All of those pesky acronyms
Reading Time: < 1 minIn the world of technology, there are a ton of acronyms to describe various things. For example, I’m writing this post using a CMS (Content Management System), the text looks nice thanks to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and I often write about things such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I’m a big listener of the […]
Who shares your transactive memory?
Reading Time: 2 minThe idea of “transactive memory” is fascinating to me. In short, it’s the idea that you allow others to remember parts of your life (and vice-versa) so that you don’t have to hold it all in. For example, my wife is helping my daughter get ready to head off to the University of Georgia this […]
Shifting ideas versus flip-flopping
Reading Time: < 1 minI’ve said for nearly a decade that changing your mind on a topic can be a great thing. This can be little things like the type of phone you prefer, or bigger things like the governmental policies that you support. Locking yourself in and refusing to be open to new ideas is a dangerous place […]
Cynic or Skeptic?
Reading Time: < 1 minI talk a lot on here about asking questions and looking beyond the obvious, but there is a fine line between being in inquisitive skeptic and simply being a cynic. Darren Hardy recently put out a video about this, and he defined the words this way: A cynic distrusts most of the information they hear. […]
Whenever there is judgment, there is noise
Reading Time: 2 minI shared a bit from Daniel Kahneman last year when I talked about complex language vs credible intelligence. I was recently listening to Daniel on the Hidden Brain podcast with Shankar Vedantam when Daniel raised another great observation. His most recent book is titled “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment“, and digs into how “noise” […]
The truth is worth more than your agenda
Reading Time: 2 minThe past year has opened my eyes to a lot of things. What I’m noticing more and more, particularly on social media, is people that share stories that fit their agenda with literally no concern about the facts. It gets worse when the facts become clear, yet they double down. I see it happen more […]
You’re not bad at remembering – you just don’t care
Reading Time: < 1 minThere are some people that have photographic memory or otherwise remarkable abilities to remember things. Beyond those outliers, the rest of us are about the same — we remember the things that we put work into. Rick Kitagawa recently shared this idea on his blog, where he said: I used to subscribe to the notion […]