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.

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

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.

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.