unfiled
One interesting idea at a time. A study, a paradox, a moment in history, and the assumption it quietly overturns.
Why experts miss the easy answer
A 1942 water jar puzzle and a 2008 chess study show how the first good answer can hide a better one, especially for experts.
The simplest strategy won
The prisoner's dilemma says trust is a losing bet. Then a tournament of computer programs found the opposite, and the winner fit in a sentence.
Nobody noticed the stranger had changed
In a 1998 experiment, a stranger was swapped mid-conversation and about half the people never noticed. The stranger finding came next.
The summer a volcano wrote Frankenstein
In 1816, summer never came. A distant eruption, a rainy villa on Lake Geneva, and a teenager with a week indoors changed literature.
Why you keep seeing it everywhere now
Learn a new word and suddenly it is everywhere. The frequency illusion explains why, and why the feeling that something keeps appearing is how the mind builds false patterns.
You don't know why you do what you do
An experiment with identical stockings shows that people confidently invent reasons for choices driven by something else entirely, and that this happens to everyone, all the time.
Nobody noticed your worst moment
A study with an embarrassing t-shirt reveals the spotlight effect, the gap between how much you think people are watching you and how little they actually are.
How a plan to kill cobras created more cobras
A colonial bounty program aimed at wiping out cobras in Delhi backfired spectacularly, and the same trap still shows up anywhere an incentive rewards the wrong thing.
Are you the same person you were ten years ago?
The Ship of Theseus is a two thousand year old puzzle about identity, and it turns out to be a question about you.
The man who discovered handwashing died in an asylum
Ignaz Semmelweis proved handwashing saved lives, and was ridiculed and institutionalized for it. What his story says about how we treat inconvenient truths.
Before you tear down the fence, ask why it's there
G.K. Chesterton's warning about fences, and why real independent thinking means understanding a rule before you break it.
The marshmallow test taught us the wrong lesson
A famous study got a second look, and the tidy lesson about willpower it left us with did not survive the closer look.
The planes that came back were the wrong data.
Survivorship bias and the WWII bomber study, why the data you can see is often the data that already survived.
You can ride a bike. You can't draw one.
A researcher asked people to draw a bicycle from memory, and the results exposed a gap between feeling like you understand something and being able to explain it.
Why I built unfiled
One idea per issue, the kind worth a second look. A bias, a paradox, a strange piece of history, a study that reframes something ordinary. The ideas worth keeping.
Looking for guides to keeping a commonplace book? See Commonplace Books.