Julian Rotter, one of the most influential academic psychologists of the 20th century, suggested that people tend to fall somewhere on the scale between having what he called an internal locus (‘internals’) and having an external locus (‘externals’). What does this mean, and what are the implications?
Keep Your Identity Fluid
Why do some discussions involving smart and reasonable people generate such emotive responses and so often go nowhere? Why does this happen more often for politics and religion than for discussing, say, preferred sock colours? In Paul Graham’s essay Keep Your Identity Small, he suggests that these topics are often too close to our identities which can obscure the truth:
4 Common Prediction Failures and How to Fix Them
Our predictions fail in predictably bad ways. Picture the last time you were getting ready to leave the house and you were asked how much longer you would take. And when was the last time you actually left by then? You might be better at this than I am, but I have struggled with forecasting how long it will take. My dad used to account for this, and pretended we needed to leave 15 minutes before we actually did. Without knowing, my dad was accounting for Hofstadter's Law: