Critical Thinking

Defense and Future 1 Defense and Future – Part 1: Building Cognitive Immunity 2 Defense and Future – Part 2: The Ethics of the Nudge 3 Defense and Future – Part 3: The Coming Age of Synthetic Persuasion ← Series Home Shortcuts Rules of thumb for quick classification Behavioral psychology The Antiquity of the Scam: When Opinions Are Cheap For centuries, human societies have been driven by a constant scramble to capture human awareness for commercial or political ends. Every request, whether for a purchase, a vote, or a donation, is designed to compel compliance, often by exploiting fundamental psychological principles,. In a world of extraordinary complexity, people rely heavily on “shortcuts,” or rules of thumb, to classify information quickly and respond mindlessly when trigger features are present. These automatic responses, while necessary for daily efficiency, make the public terribly vulnerable to those who know how to manipulate them. This state of affairs ensures that the electorate operates not as a dispassionate jury weighing evidence, but as an entity primarily guided by emotional and psychological networks,. ...

The Bounded Mind ← Series Home The Illusion of the Perfect Agent For generations, the archetypal manager was envisioned as a perfectly rational agent: a decision-maker equipped with flawless logic, infinite time, and endless computational capacity, whose sole aim was to maximize utility. This ideal, often rooted in classical economic models, placed instinct, emotion, and intuition in a corner of shame, separate from the pristine domain of analysis. Yet, the experience of modern leadership—especially amidst tsunami-like spikes of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), such as the 2020 pandemic—has rendered this classical image obsolete. We all possess the capacity to think, much as we know how to run, but aiming to win a marathon rather than merely catching a bus requires a structured method to upgrade our processes. The central paradox facing the contemporary manager is reconciling the myth of unbounded, flawless calculation with the messy reality of the “bounded mind”. The question is not whether we can achieve perfect rationality—we cannot—but how we can successfully integrate our inescapable limitations with a disciplined framework. ...