The 9 articles, ideas, and tools that change my world in 2022

In?last week’s edition, I shared the nine posts of 2022 you read the most. I featured three of them from my #swipefile, but over the course of an average year, I share well over?300+. Not all of them stick around in my head, but some of them do. And, as I talked about last week, some of them are?so?world-changing for me that they give rise to new ideas.

Here are the articles that did (or are doing!) that for me last year:

Indifference versus Ambivalence: The Effect of a Neutral Point on Consumer Attitude and Preference Measurement

So this one’s pretty wonky—the link is to a research paper. That said, I’ve continually referred to two concepts in it since I first ran across it: the difference between “indifference” and “ambivalence,” and the idea of “removing the neutral position” (which is what finding the?Goal?of your Red Thread helps you do.

Author Talks: Rich Diviney says attributes—not skills—determine whether you ‘cut it’ or not

While the author talk in last week’s Top 9 post (the one on the?four frictions that get in the way of new ideas) definitely registers as a world-changing post for me, this one did, too. I just love Rich Diviney’s distinction between skills and attributes, which he defines as the traits that appear under “stress, challenge, and uncertainty.”

When Safety Proves Dangerous

This article introduced me to the (apparently controversial) idea of “risk homeostasis,” which the article defines this way: “enforcing measures to make people safer will inevitably lead to changes in behavior that maintain the amount of risk we’d like to experience, like driving faster while wearing a seatbelt.”

Thought-terminating cliché

Someone referred to this in a Twitter thread—it was such a great term that I had to include it here.

TheMeasureOfThings.com

My new favorite tool! Put in a measurement and it will give you that measurement’s equivalent in everyday things!

The IKEA effect and the production of epistemic goods

This was the article that made me realize I’m an accidental epistemologist.??More useful to?you, though, is this new research shows that the “IKEA effect” (where you value something you built yourself more than something you didn’t—a previous #swipefile share!) may apply to beliefs and ideas, too.

Brains use Patterns, not Processing

It’s always useful to learn when ideas about how our brain works start to evolve, and this is one of several articles this past year that seems to indicate that’s happening. Since you may or may not be able to access this Medium article, here’s the money quote: “Instead of data driving a brain with some kind of construction or process, it is stored patterns driving everything: sensory patterns stored with their originating sensors, and matched patterns continuing away from the senses into the brain for further consolidation, specialization, and pattern composition.”

Artificial neural networks learn better when they spend time not learning at all

I featured this in a?“how could you use it?”?right at the end of the year, but the concept of “catastrophic forgetting,” which is what happens when new information overwrites old information, rather than getting consolidated into it, is, well, hard to forget.

Muppet Show Pitch

Any list that ends with the Muppets is a good list, in my book. This link takes you to the wrap-up of the original pitch for?The Muppet Show?and is a?fabulous example?of doing pitching and persuasion right.

Those are the articles that changed my world in 2022. Which ones changed yours??Email me?and let me know!