sagewords

There’s a crisis in Bitcoin. Or you could say there’ve been a series of crises in Bitcoin over the last several years, many of them stemming from the same root cause. Either way, there’s a mountain to

What’s the most commonly cited problem with Bitcoin? Scalability! According to just about anyone you’d care to ask, scaling up to handle the kind of transaction volumes that companies like Visa handle

The new Bitcoin Gold fork set to occur on October 25th hopes it shakes things up. The result could be a new burst of wealth creation and a return to how Bitcoin was mined in its early days...or it could

Everybody knows hedonic adaptation. Better known as the hedonic treadmill, this is our natural inclination to quickly get accustomed to things around us. It’s typically used to explain how we humans run

The eminent sociologist Max Weber devised a useful way to understand how authority figures get and keep power. He described three different categories: rational-legal authority, traditional authority,

Groupthink has been around for as long as humans have formed groups and made decisions together, yet this foundational psychological concept didn’t really get formalized until 1972. A psychologist named

Taking a breather from thinking other topics, this is something I wrote recently about personal finance. I should note that it's directed toward Americans. Gaining financial independence won’t happen

I wrote down about twenty-five things I’m grateful for earlier today. This exercise is something I think everyone should do periodically. I suppose it may have had something to do with Mother’s Day around

You know what an expat is, but have you met a repat? This is what I’ve come to think is a good--and the most obvious--term for people who’ve gone abroad for some length of time and then found it difficult

Loss aversion is one of the most popular cognitive biases we have. Most people have heard of it, or at least know how it feels to lose something. We humans have this itch in our minds to avoid loss wherever

We’ve all probably heard of flow. We know that reaching a state of flow is good, making us more likely to do good work or play well in a sporting event. Flow takes us to a deeper place, one from which

There’s a concept out there called the hype cycle. It’s a simple yet meaningful idea taken from this graphical image created by the Gartner consulting firm. Its intended purpose is to show the rise of

To the human mind, there’s nothing better than a goose chase, even a wild one. Novelty thrills us while routine feels stifling, especially for us Millennials. Yet we all know that reacting to the latest

Mostly, I drink coffee and water. Most of the time, that’s it, usually black coffee the first half of the day and water the second half. This is one of my simple rules, things I do to manage complexity,

When it comes to personal finance, many people think that small expenses don’t matter. People share advice along the lines of: don’t worry about buying coffee everyday before work, don’t get all that bummed

The explore/exploit tradeoff is something I read about recently in Algorithms to Live By, a recent book bringing together psychology and computer science. It’s one of those useful constructs to mentally

You and I, we have something in common. We both hate to see our time wasted. Neither one of us wants to waste energy by putting lots of effort into something that doesn’t hold water. We want to effective,

Here’s a story: Once there was a man who went to websites. He had a habit of putting things in a shopping cart, often dozens and dozens of items. But he would rarely buy anything. Eventually, he would

We humans are self-interested creatures. Our concern is focused on what affects us and we naturally see the world through self-colored lenses. And that’s okay. Actually, it would be almost impossible to

Ah, I’ve missed my target! I was aiming for one post a week on a different cognitive bias, since making something routine is how we humans generally do best. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about surrogation.