 Were you ever told as a kid that if you play with fire or even watch it burn You'd wet the bed at night or or even you'd pee uncontrollably in your sleep And this is what my family used to tell me back when I was a toddler And even when I was playing with something like a piece of dead wood whenever my father was making a barbecue And this wasn't actually a family specific piece of wisdom And I believe that my friends Parents used to tell the same thing to their toddlers and the reason they were doing this was not backed up by by by research Or not even by rational reasoning, but only because a child can better relate to this Familiar and embarrassing consequence of being in bed rather than the more abstract and theoretical dangers of fire so my parents were essentially making use of heuristics to get the job done and heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow us to quickly craft the conclusion and bypass the inconvenience of deep thinking as deep thinking is a process that consumes more mental resources and We do not know if and when the benefits of deep thinking will come to life And we humans use mental shortcuts when there's actually no time for deep thinking and I believe that in today's world We're actually just allocating a lot less time Getting to the roots of a particular problem and we are using these mental shortcuts on a daily basis Their goal is to get us from point A to point B without too much cognitive load Skipping the part where we think through the downsides of choosing a particular path It is sort of like an if this then that mechanism for choosing a particular road and these mental shortcuts are So embedded within ourselves so much that they have become a reflex and we we rarely stop and start questioning Their wisdom their meaning or their true application And what I'm trying to do I'm trying to better learn how to spot these type of mental Trickery and there are some good quality mental shortcuts that have been sort of tested from an evolutionary standpoint And maybe we we can trust so it's about simple things such as a cheat shot or a water cooler type of conversation One should ask questions instead of trying to be affirmative and make a point It's a lot easier to do that. It can be more effective communication wise You can keep the flow going with that particular person without upsetting or Sparking a not so useful type of conversation or maybe you can look at things such as Decision-making where decisions having a utility of less than X amount of dollars should be made faster in something like under 20 seconds this time is more Valuable overall and it might not be worth to spend more than say 20 seconds thinking about that particular decision And if you want to browse through some rough statistics, they essentially tell us that Bill Gates made something like $300 per second in 2018 and by following this train of thought it would not be worth his time to stop and pick up a $100 bill laying on the ground and also because he might crack his back or something like that You know, and there's another mental shortcut I found useful and this is sort of like related to communication If you're talking to a person trying to construct and make a point in regards to some random easy to digest Obviously true topics such as saying that the lion is bigger than an ant and if that particular person will not accept What you are saying we should be inclined to think that there is a communication error And that actually means that you could have communicated that specific thing in a better way Because you are probably oftentimes jumping to your guns saying that the person who you're talking to is stupid and cannot comprehend What you're saying instead of looking at yourself First and analyzing your lack of good communication and another mental shortcut another heuristic I found useful by default is to be a skeptic and not trust facts based on small pieces of information like Text audio or video quotations taken out of context For example, you see on online two-minute video with the president saying that he will do this and that But to form an opinion on the overall situation one must read listen or watch the whole video And again being a default skeptic in terms of ingesting fragmented pieces of Content is a high quality mental shortcut and the last thing to consider is that these high quality mental shortcuts come from experience You're building feedback loops so that you can automatically tell yourself when situation X occurs then why might happen as well and Boiling them up and updating them along the way might be indeed the best thing to do