Don’t flip a coin, choose information. When both outcomes are equally preferable, pick the less familiar one: the more unknown outcome has more value, namely in information.

Interpreting a loosely held generalization as a strict commitment, by projecting one’s own binary mode of asserting onto the speaker.

A good whose demand is driven by social momentum despite buyers lacking a clear understanding of its utility.

The act or result of reducing something genuinely difficult to a shorter, clearer form through deliberate effort; the compressed result appears simple, yet loses none of the original’s substance.

The practice of enjoying abundance without becoming dependent on it, while converting good times into resilience for when conditions change.

When an LLM converges to a plausible answer too early, missing out on the latent knowledge it possesses.

Failing to accept a claim because accepting it would amount to tacitly accepting an unwanted truth about oneself. The outer thing (the claim) is refused so the inner thing (the self-implication) never has to be faced.

• A professor dismisses a junior’s study, because accepting it would mean admitting he overlooked that direction for years.
• A doctor rejects a new treatment’s evidence; granting it works implies his past patients were undertreated.
• An editor finds reasons to pass on a manuscript whose success would imply his earlier rejections were misjudgments.

A good whose future purchase or consumption is a near-foregone conclusion. When acquisition is this certain and you are not liquidity-constrained, buying it now captures more of its benefit over time, so deferring an Inevitable Good is just can-kicking with no upside.

A good whose real usefulness you can only discover by buying it: until you own it, you cannot know whether you will truly use it. The potential sits latent, and the outcome is often binary: it opens a whole new world (a new hobby, a new way of life) or it stays unused and rusts. The inverse of an Inevitable Good.

The uncertainty about your own motivations for doing something.

Intuition after awareness: when the meta observer is observing intuition and is able, to some degree, to decipher what it all means. As opposed to pre-intuition, intuition as we all know it.

An insight identical in content to its naive form, but transformed in how it is held, because it has passed through and survived the complication, doubt, or lived experience that dissolved the naive version. The state itself: postnaivety.

The term is modeled on Ricoeur’s second naïveté, but generalizes it: it applies to any insight rather than symbolic or religious belief, and the endpoint may remain reflective rather than returning to direct, lived engagement.

Sincerely producing a wrong, off-target reason for a feeling or choice whose real cause is out of view. The reason is not a lie and not a cover-up. It misses because the true cause sits where conscious reasoning cannot point, so the mind supplies a stand-in that heads the wrong way, and pursuing it only strays further.

• Someone avoids the train and says “it’s a hassle” and “it’s so unclear,” when the real cause is fear of the unknown or of being confined in a moving cabin.
• A person turns down a promotion citing “the commute,” when the actual driver is a fear of being exposed as not good enough.
• Someone keeps putting off a phone call calling it “pointless,” when the real reason is dread of the other person’s reaction.