A new year is an opportunity for a reset, in which many of us resolve to be wiser than we were last year. So, to help you kickstart 2025 a little wiser, I’ve compiled 25 ideas I think will prove useful to you. The ideas come from many times, places, and disciplines; the only thing they have in common is that I think they’re useful, whether by improving your decision-making or helping you understand a crucial topic.

Concision is the goal here, so my descriptions will only give you a summary of each idea. If you want to know more, click on the titles.

1. Negative Partisanship:

Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

2. Enshittification:

Online services start out serving users. When they have enough users, they switch to serving advertisers/shareholders, at the expense of users. For instance, Google Search initially showed you what you searched for, but now largely shows you what it wants you to see.

3. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty:

The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

— Judith Butler, Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time (1997)

4. Reminiscence Bump:

Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked – morally, politically, economically, artistically – whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.

9. Stockdale Paradox:

The optimal state of mind is neither optimism, which leaves you unprepared for adversity, nor pessimism, which destroys motivation, but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.

10. Ichi-go ichi-e:

Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.

11. Explanatory Inversion:

Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realize poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.

15. Goal Dilution Effect:

We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.

16. Bias Blindspot:

We see bias easily in others, but not in ourselves. Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, people reply to tell me how it explains their opponents’ beliefs, but never their own. The assumption that bias is just something that affects those we disagree with is our greatest source of bias.

“[O]n that fragile little sphere … all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be.”

— Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

19. Rumsfeld Matrix:

There are things you know you know, things you don’t know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know. The last group is the biggest pitfall. Always try to account for what you don’t know you don’t know.

22. Deviancy Amplification:

An outrageous act or event gets the public’s attention, prompting reporters to look for new examples. Cases that previously wouldn’t have been considered newsworthy are reported just because they fit the trend, creating the impression of an epidemic of such events. A recent example is mystery drone sightings.

23. Left-Brain Interpreter:

Experiments on split-brain patients show that when the experimenters instruct the patient’s right-side of the brain to perform an action (e.g. open the window), the patient will do it, and then the left-side of their brain, which was unaware of the instruction, will convince the patient they chose to do it unbidden (e.g. “because I felt hot”).

Our reasons are stories we tell ourselves.

24. Barrow’s First Law (aka Barrow’s Uncertainty Principle):

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” So don’t worry if you don’t know why you’re here, or where you’ll eventually go. Just focus on living. The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.

25. Sphexishness:

Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion:

Sphexishness is when you blindly follow a rule without checking if the rule works in the present situation. Don’t use the concepts in this list sphexishly. They’ve been presented here to make you think, not as rigid rules to follow in all circumstances.

That’s all for now. For more lists of useful concepts, check out this, and this, and this, and this, and this.

Thanks for reading, and happy new year.

G.

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