You’ve probably been in the following situation: you’re talking to someone whom you don’t know very well, and in an effort to get to know you better, they ask something along the lines of “what’s your favorite movie?” or “what’s your favorite book?”. Odds are that you now have to start racking your brain …
A phonetic alphabet is an alphabet in which each letter is represented by a codeword that starts with that letter. For example, in a phonetic alphabet, the letter ‘B’ could be represented by the word ‘Bravo’, while the letter ‘P’ could be represented by the word ‘Papa’. The NATO phonetic alphabet, which uses a standardized set …
A common piece of conventional wisdom is that you should never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. Intuitively, this makes sense: if you’re already full when you go to buy food, you’ll be less tempted to buy extra food items. However, studies on the topic show that this is not always the case. Rather, …
Did you ever spend hours going over the same document again and again, and found yourself automatically skipping over whole words and sentences, because you already read this text so many times that your brain just goes on autopilot? Proofreading is an important but tedious part of writing. The problem is that since your brain …
The spotlight effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate the degree to which they are observed and noticed by others, as well as the degree to which others care about the things that they notice about them. For example, the spotlight effect could cause someone to think that everyone is going …
In game theory, a smart player accounts for the fact that the choices that other players make reveal a lot about their position. This article will show you how this concept works and how you can take advantage of it, by looking at the example of the Money Envelope game. The setting Richard and …
Most of us go to sleep with our phone within reach. This can be a problem, because keeping your phone next to you in bed often leads to a variety of sleep, health, and productivity issues. In the following article, you will learn why you are better off putting your phone out of reach …
One of the basic principles in game theory is that you should look forward and reason back. Essentially, this means that before making a move, you should consider all the possible moves that you and the other players can make, together with the possible outcomes that these moves lead to. Then, consider how desirable each outcome …
When you learn a new language, it’s important to get a lot of exposure to it. One of the best ways to do this is by watching movies and TV shows in your target language. In general, it’s better for you to watch foreign-language videos with subtitles, rather than without them. However, this gives rise …
A strawman is a fallacious argument that distorts an opposing stance in order to make it easier to attack. Essentially, the person using the strawman pretends to attack their opponent’s stance, while in reality they are actually attacking a distorted version of that stance, which their opponent doesn’t necessarily support. For example, if someone says “I think …