Scientific Definition
The longer an idea has survived, the longer it likely will.
Plain-English Definition
The longer an idea has survived, the longer it likely will.
Feynman Explanation
Shakespeare will outlive your favorite podcast.
Core Principle
The longer an idea has survived, the longer it likely will.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
The longer an idea has survived, the longer it likely will.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Distinguishing fads from durable shifts.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Shakespeare will outlive your favorite podcast.
Examples
- Concepts that have lasted 50 years probably last another 50.
- Distinguishing fads from durable shifts.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Default skepticism on the new; default attention on the durable.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Default skepticism on the new; default attention on the durable.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Ignoring general statistics in favor of specific, vivid information.
Posterior = (likelihood × prior) / evidence.
Update beliefs in proportion to the strength of new evidence.
Start with a prior; update with new evidence.
Novices experiencing early success, often due to variance and small samples.
High-impact, hard-to-predict, retrospectively explainable events.
Striking pattern that is statistically expected in large samples.
Reasoning in distributions — ranges and probabilities — rather than points.
Average outcomes across the population differ from outcomes across time for one person.
A rough calculation using order-of-magnitude reasoning.
In quantum mechanics, certain pairs of properties cannot both be precisely known.
We ignore sample size when judging probability.