Meta-Analysis

Your capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn faster than the environment changes.

Malcolm Knowles's principles of adult learning: self-direction, experience as resource, readiness, problem-centered orientation, intrinsic motivation.

Amishi Jha's research: attention is a finite, depletable, but trainable cognitive resource — short daily mindfulness measurably improves it.

Approach a situation as if you knew nothing.

Unusual or bizarre material is more memorable than common material.

Hierarchy of cognitive learning: Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create. Benjamin Bloom, 1956 (revised 2001).

Moving between abstraction levels — chunking up finds shared values, chunking down finds specifics.

We recognize faces from our own race more accurately than others.

Emotional states distort cognition and decision-making.

Believing abilities are static and cannot be developed.

We process evidence in ways that protect our group identity.

Greedy improvement loops climb hills that aren't the highest hill.

Underestimating the probability of bad outcomes — especially to us.

A behavioral relaxation of Nash: players choose better strategies more often, but not always — errors are smooth, not binary.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

A controlled scenario, often impossible, used to isolate a variable and test an intuition or theory.

Tenure-track jobs replaced by low-paid adjuncts, lowering cost and quality.

Favoring suggestions from automated systems over conflicting human judgment.