AI in Schools: The Motivation Risk
AI threatens student motivation when it removes the productive struggle that turns effort into curiosity.
8 min 4 scenes
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Mind & Society
Psychology, education, sociology, politics, and economic behaviour.
Why Sunk Costs Feel Like Reasons to Keep Going
Sunk costs hijack future decisions through three specific cognitive moves — loss framing, effort justification, and identity commitment — turning a closed financial chapter into a live argument for persistence.
16 min 8 scenes
Sunk Costs Hiding in Opportunity-Cost Reasoning
A concrete way to recognize when a forward-looking opportunity cost secretly bundles an unrecoverable past outlay, so the two costs can be separated.
18 min 9 scenes
Spotting the Sunk Cost in Disguise
Sunk costs distort decisions in recognizable, patterned ways — and a few targeted self-questions can expose them before they pull you in.
16 min 8 scenes
Real Options vs. Irreversibility
Irreversibility creates a quantifiable cost that option value must clear before action becomes rational, turning 'just decide' into 'compare a threshold to the expected upside'.
16 min 8 scenes
The Sunk-Cost Double Count
A precise picture of how sunk costs get re-injected into opportunity-cost comparisons, the standard double-count pattern that produces it, and a simple test that exposes the error.
18 min 9 scenes
When Does Irreversibility Change a Decision?
Irreversibility is the loss of the option to recover the foregone alternative, and once that option is destroyed, rational choice depends on the value of waiting under uncertainty rather than on the size of the payoffs alone.
16 min 8 scenes
When Opportunity Cost Misleads
Opportunity cost gives wrong guidance when the forgone option is misidentified, when sunk costs are double-counted, or when the alternative was never realistically available — and a quick 'would I actually choose this if nothing else were on the table?' test reveals most of these traps.
16 min 8 scenes
When Opportunity Cost Fails
Opportunity cost reliably frames decisions between measurable alternatives of similar scope, but loses explanatory power when options involve incommensurable values, sunk commitments, or irreversible consequences.
16 min 8 scenes
Where Does 1/√n Shrinkage Show Up?
The standard error of a mean shrinks as 1/√n, and this same scaling shows up visibly in dice averages, polling margins, and physics timing experiments.
18 min 9 scenes
When Opportunity Cost Breaks Down
Opportunity cost delivers sharp answers only inside a narrow boundary of comparable, reversible, scale-compatible choices — and it breaks down precisely when decisions become identity-laden, irreversible, or incommensurable.
14 min 7 scenes
What You Give Up vs. What You Pay
Opportunity cost is the value of the next-best alternative you forgo, while price is the money exchanged; the two diverge whenever time, attention, or forgone options carry value beyond the transaction itself.
16 min 8 scenes
The Real Cost of a Choice
The cost of a choice is the value of the next-best alternative you gave up, not the price you paid.
8 min 4 scenes
How Machines Judge Similarity
Machines judge similarity by representing items as numerical vectors and computing the distance between them in a feature space.
8 min 4 scenes
TikTok FYP vs Instagram Explore
TikTok's For You Page learns you from pure watch behavior on strangers' videos, while Instagram's Explore learns you from likes and saves blended with your social graph — that's why they feel different.
8 min 4 scenes
Why We Enjoy Sad Songs
We enjoy sad songs because the brain simulates loss in a safe context, triggering consolation neurochemistry such as prolactin that real sorrow does not provide.
8 min 4 scenes
流星雨是怎么发生的
流星雨是地球穿过彗星遗留的碎片带时产生的，辐射点是透视造成的视错觉。
8 min 4 scenes
镜像反转：艺术中的对称魔法
镜像反转不是简单的复制粘贴，而是一种把同一形状分成两个对立的'世界'的装置——它制造意义，靠的是让差异在对称中现身。
16 min 8 scenes
镜像反转的视觉与心理效应
镜像反转揭示了大脑对'自我视角'的偏好：熟悉的方向会被当作真实，反向则显得陌生，而艺术家和心理学家正是利用这种不对称来制造意义。
8 min 4 scenes
How Borda Count Crowns a Loser
Borda count collapses the *ordering* of preferences into *points*, so the size of the margin at each rank — not just the ranking itself — decides the winner, and this lets a candidate who is last against every rival still win overall.
16 min 8 scenes
When Elections Misbehave: Arrow's Impossibility in Practice
Arrow's impossibility becomes tangible when a single set of ballots reveals three different failures: plurality violates Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives through a spoiler, Borda count violates Condorcet/transitivity via a reversal, and instant-runoff voting fails transitivity through a cycle.
16 min 8 scenes
夜里的魔法师：噩梦在帮我们整理心情
8 min 4 scenes
孩子的噩梦，是在悄悄完成一件重要的事
10 min 5 scenes
夜里的小烦恼，自己会变小
8 min 4 scenes