As humans, our ability to make the right decisions is limited by the many constraints of our minds. One such constraint is the availability bias — our tendency to make judgments based on previous experiences that are easily recalled. When some piece of information is quickly brought to mind, we incorrectly assume that it’s an accurate reflection of reality.This <a href="https://nesslabs.com/tag/cognitive-biases">cognitive bias</a> often leads to the illusion of rational thinking and, ultimately, to bad decisions.

What We Easily Recall, We Believe

In 1955, Dr Herbert Simon formulated the notion that memory limitations can affect decision-making. Simon further elaborated that it’s not possible for humans to consider every piece of relevant information. Instead, we focus on the data within our minds that’s readily available and thus seems to be the most pertinent.Simon’s research opened the door to the modern examination of decision-making processes, and the shortcuts we utilise to reach conclusions.

The History Of Availability Bias

There is a natural human tendency to assume that examples we can readily think of are more relevant than they truly are.For example, if you’re looking for a new note-taking app, you might go for a particular tool because you recall that a friend recently raved about it. Or, if you read about a plane crash in the news a week before you are due to fly for work, you may overestimate the likelihood of your own plane crashing.

Demonstrating Availability Bias

Availability is an ecologically valid clue for the judgement of frequency because, in general, frequent events are easier to recall or imagine than infrequent ones.However, availability is also affected by various factors which are unrelated to actual frequency. If the availability heuristic is applied, then such factors will affect the perceived frequency of classes and the subjective probability of events.Consequently, the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.

Frequent Events Are On Top Of Mind

Availability bias can also influence consumer’s beliefs about perceived risk. Availability bias can also impact self-evaluation.Even doctors can misdiagnose patients as a result of the availability bias. A recent experience of a health condition makes it easier to recall and therefore increases the chance that a subsequent patient might be misdiagnosed with the same illness.

Availability Bias Is Everywhere

Instead of going for the most obvious solution, which is likely to be heavily influenced by your most recent experiences, conduct research and generate as many potential solutions as possible based on factual data. You can practise deliberate <a href="https://nesslabs.com/brainstorming">brainstorming</a> on your own or with your team. This not only helps to manage availability bias, but may also lead to the generation of innovative solutions that you may not otherwise have considered.

How to Manage the Availability Bias: Deliberate Brainstorming

Red teaming is similar to playing devil’s advocate. It involves rigorously challenging ideas and assessing ideas from an opposing point of view to discover flaws or shortcomings. The aim is to avoid making unsound decisions and mitigate potential adverse events. As part of red teaming ideas, decision-makers should explore alternative solutions, interrogate the underlying facts, and try to view the decision from an impartial point of view to thoroughly test the integrity of a decision.

Try “Red Teaming” Ideas.

Self-reflection can take the form of journaling, talking out loud to yourself, or thinking deeply about a decision while <a href="https://nesslabs.com/focused-mind">away from distractions</a> — for example while taking a walk. Taking time to reflect on decisions prior to executing them allows for a delay that will reduce the power of the availability bias, so that other ideas have the necessary space to surface.

Self Reflection

While the mind’s shortcuts make decision-making quicker and easier, they can lead to less-than-ideal solutions. As you have seen, the availability bias may lead to poor personal and professional decisions. While it’s impossible for this cognitive bias to be completely overridden, you can avoid some of its most negative effects by brainstorming, red teaming ideas, and implementing a self-reflection practice. These strategies will help you take a more objective view of the information available to you.

The Bottom Line

As humans, our ability to make the right decisions is limited by the many constraints of our mind. One such constraint is the availability bias, our tendency to make judgments based on previous experiences that are easily recalled.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Availability bias: the tendency to use information that easily comes to mind

Two things determine how life turns out – luck and the quality of your decisions. You can’t affect luck, but you can affect the quality of your decisions. By improving the quality of the decisions, you increase the odds of good things happening to you.The future is inherently uncertain, so good decisions cannot guarantee outcomes. They just make good outcomes more likely.

Why You Should Care About Making Better Decisions

People generally find it hard to distinguish a good quality decision from a decision that turned out well. Instead of assessing the decision-making process, they just tend to look at the result of the decision. Psychologists call this “outcome bias”.The idea that the result of a decision tells you something about the quality of a decision is extremely powerful (but wrong). You can give someone the same exact facts describing a decision but their view of whether the decision is good or bad will usually change depending on how the decision turns out.

Assessing the Quality of Past Decisions: Outcome Bias

In the case of any single decision, good quality decisions can still turn out bad and a bad quality decision can still turn out good. This is due to the role that luck plays. In the long run, however, higher quality decisions are more likely to lead to better outcomes.The paradox of experience is the idea that experience is necessary for learning, but individual experiences often interfere with learning. This is because of various cognitive biases that hinder our ability to view decisions accurately.

The Paradox Of Experience

Most people are likely to blame bad luck for a bad outcome and credit skill for a good outcome. This is motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is the tendency to process information to get to the conclusion we want (rather than the truth). Motivated reasoning might be comforting, but it hinders your ability to learn from your experiences and make better decisions. In the long run, it’s better to be accurate in how you perceive the world, so that you can make better decisions.

Biases: Motivated Reasoning

Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe that the way something turned out was inevitable or at least predictable. A common example is when people say “I should have known”, “I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming”, or “I told you so (especially if they didn’t)”. Hindsight bias can distort your memory of what you knew at the time you made the decision.Resulting and hindsight bias can also make you less compassionate. It can make you more likely to blame people for bad outcomes even when the bad outcome wasn’t their fault.

Hindsight Bias

Confirmation bias – The tendency to notice and seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs.Disconfirmation bias – The tendency to be more critical of information that contradicts our existing beliefs.Overconfidence – overestimating our own skills, intellect or talent.Availability bias – overestimating the frequency or likelihood of events that are easily available (e.g. more vivid events are easier to recall, so are more available).Recency bias – believing that recent events are more likely to occur than they actually are.

Common Cognitive Biases

A decision tree is a useful tool for evaluating past decisions and improving the quality of new ones.Before a decision, the different potential outcomes of that decision are like the many different branches of a decision tree. There are many possible futures but only one past. Once the outcome of a decision is known, resulting(outcome bias) and hindsight bias causes us to mentally “chop off” branches that never happened. You should consider the counterfactuals – i.e. the outcomes that could have happened but didn’t. The counterfactuals will put the actual outcome into context.

Handling Biases: Make A Decision Tree

“Reasonable” is the key word here. You don’t have to try and account for every possibility. Some outcomes are so unlikely it’s not useful to include them in your decision process.These outcomes can be general scenarios or more focused on particular aspects that you care about. For example, if you’re hiring an employee and the most important thing to you is staff turnover, your possible outcomes could be whether they will leave in < 6 months, between 6-12 months, between 1-2 years, etc.

Steps to Make Better Decisions: Identify the Reasonable Set of Possible Outcomes

To what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your values? This is a personal question that can vary between individuals. The simplest way to do this is to list potential outcomes on the tree in order from most preferred to least.You should also think about the magnitude or size of each preference – i.e. how good or how bad is each outcome? If you don’t consider the size of the payoffs, you can’t figure out if going for a potential upside worth risking the potential downside. Size is easy to measure when the payoff is in money, but can be trickier if it’s in something else.

Identify Your Preference Using the Payoff for Each Outcome

It’s important to make an estimate, even if you’re unsureMost people are uncomfortable estimating the likelihood of something happening in the future because they don’t like being wrong. Since you don’t have perfect information, you can’t give an objectively perfect answer.Thinking there is only “right” and “wrong”, with nothing in between, is one of the biggest obstacles to good decision-making. You almost always know something that is relevant to assessing the probability, and something is better than nothing.

Estimate the Likelihood of Each Outcome Unfolding

One way to make higher quality decisions is to get more information – often from other people. If you’re using these ambiguous terms with other people, it’s harder to uncover disagreement (and disagreement can help you get relevant information). Precision uncovers disagreement. For example, say you think something has around a 30% chance of happening, and your friend thinks it has a 70% chance. If you tell them you think it has a 30% chance of happening, your disagreement is revealed immediately.

Use an Explicit Probability Rather than An Ambiguous Term

Once you’ve made an estimate of the likelihood of each outcome, it’s important to be clear about how uncertain your estimate is. A good way to do this is to offer a range alongside your estimate.The purpose of a range is to signal, to yourself and to others, how uncertain you are of your guess. By expressing your uncertainty, you are implicitly inviting others to offer up information that can help improve your estimate.

Use A Range

<ul><li>The inside view is the view of the world from inside of your own perspective, experiences and beliefs. When you make a decision based on your intuition or gut feel, that is taking the inside view.</li><li>In contrast, the outside view is what is actually true of the world, independent of your own perspective. It’s how someone else would view your situation.</li><li>You should combine the outside view with the inside view. The inside view may have information to suggest that your chances are better or worse than average. But the outside view is a useful reality check.</li></ul>

Combine the Inside View and The Outside View

<ul><li>Smart people are better at motivated reasoning – they are more able to interpret information to confirm their prior beliefs.</li><li>Smart people are better at constructing arguments that support their views, and convincing people around them.</li><li>Smart people also tend to have more confidence in their intuition or gut. Because of that overconfidence, smart people are less likely to seek feedback.</li></ul>

The Problem With Being Too Smart

Once you’ve combined probabilities with your preferences for each payoff/outcome, you will be able to evaluate and compare options more clearly.Consider the other options objectively.Compare the options to one another but do not rely on a pros and cons list.A pros and cons list is not really designed as a tool to help you compare choices, but rather as a tool to help you evaluate a single choice.

Assess the Relative Likelihood of Outcomes You Like and Dislike for The Option Under Consideration

Beliefs are contagious. If you tell others what you think when asking for feedback, their feedback is likely to mirror your own views. Keeping your views to yourself makes people more likely to tell you what they really think.Outcomes are also contagious. If you tell people what happened when asking for feedback, it can ruin their feedback because it makes outcome bias likely. You’ll get better feedback if you tell them only as much information as you had at the time you made your decision.

Getting Feedback

Make a checklist of details that someone would need to know in order to give you high-quality feedback and then give them those details. This is particularly useful for repeating decisions because you can think about it before considering an individual instance of a decision. It’s important to agree that people participating in the feedback process are accountable to the checklist. Otherwise, someone might assume that if details are emphasised, it’s because they’re important, or if detail is missing, it’s because it’s unimportant.

Checklists for Getting Feedback

Time is a limited resource. Therefore it is important to be able to distinguish when which decisions are worth spending more time on, and which ones are not.There is a trade-off between time and accuracy. Increasing the accuracy of a decision costs time, but saving time costs accuracy.Low impact decisions are a good opportunity to take risks and “poke at the world”, which can help you learn about the world and your own preferences.

Optimizing Decisions: The Time And Accuracy Tradeoff

Happiness is a good proxy for understanding the impact of a decision on achieving long-term goals.The test involves asking yourself if the outcome of the decision will likely have a significant effect on your happiness in a year, month or week. The shorter the time period for which your answer is “no”, the quicker you can make that decision (sacrificing accuracy).

Future Happiness: A Key Metric In Making Decisions

Freerolling describes a situation where there is an asymmetry between the upside and downside because the potential losses are insignificant. The limited downside means there is not much to lose – but potentially much to gain.Once you identify a freeroll opportunity, you don’t need to think much about whether to take that opportunity, but you may still want to take time with executing the decision.

Freerolls

Sometimes we have trouble deciding between two options that seem very close to each other in quality. These decisions are “sheep in wolf’s clothing”. Even if such decisions are high impact, the closeness is a signal that you can make the decision faster and worry less about accuracy. After all, the payoffs are similar. Reframe the decision by asking, “Whichever option I choose, how wrong can I be?”We live in a world of imperfect information so, when two options are very close in quality, it’s unlikely that you can work out which option is better even by taking more time.

Close Decisions

When you make a decision, you’re doing it with limited information. As things unfold, you may get new information. That new information reveals that another option is better.There are, of course, costs to quitting. Part of a good decision-making process involves factoring in the costs of quitting. The lower the cost of quitting, the faster you can make decisions because it makes it easier to change course partway through as you get more information. When the cost of quitting is low, that can also be an opportunity to experiment and learn more about the world or your own preferences.

Quitting

Maximising is trying to make the “optimal” decision. It involves examining every possible option and trying to make the perfect choice. Most people have maximising tendencies, but there’s no such thing as a “perfect” decision when information is imperfect.Satisficing is when you just choose the first satisfactory option available. The term is made up by combining the words “satisfy” and “suffice”.

Decision Making: Maximising Vs Satisficing

<ul><li>Negative thinking is important. Not so much thinking “I am going to fail”, but thinking “If I were to fail, how might that happen?” Imagining how you might fail doesn’t make failure more likely.</li><li>In fact, it's been shown that mental contrasting, where you imagine what you want to accomplish and confront the obstacles to achieving it, can help you achieve your goals.</li></ul>

How To Use Negative Thinking

Through a blend of compelling exercises, illustrations, and stories, the bestselling author of Thinking in Bets will train you to combat your own biases, address your weaknesses, and help you become a better and more confident decision-maker. What do you do when you're faced with a big decision? If you're like most people, you probably make a pro and con list, spend a lot of time obsessing about decisions that didn't work out, get caught in analysis paralysis, endlessly seek other people's opinions to find just that little bit of extra information that might make you sure, and finally go with your gut. What if there was a better way to make quality decisions so you can think clearly, feel more confident, second-guess yourself less, and ultimately be more decisive and be more productive? Making good decisions doesn't have to be a series of endless guesswork. Rather, it's a teachable skill that anyone can sharpen. In How to Decide, bestselling author Annie Duke and former professional poker player lays out a series of tools anyone can use to make better decisions. You'll learn: • To identify and dismantle hidden biases. • To extract the highest quality feedback from those whose advice you seek. • To more accurately identify the influence of luck in the outcome of your decisions. • When to decide fast, when to decide slow, and when to decide in advance. • To make decisions that more effectively help you to realize your goals and live your values. Through interactive exercises and engaging thought experiments, this book helps you analyze key decisions you've made in the past and troubleshoot those you're making in the future. Whether you're picking investments, evaluating a job offer, or trying to figure out your romantic life, How to Decide is the key to happier outcomes and fewer regrets.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

books

Books

Through a blend of compelling exercises, illustrations, and stories, the bestselling author of Thinking in Bets will train you to combat your own biases, address your weaknesses, and help you become a better and more confident decision-maker. What do you do when you're faced with a big decision? If you're like most people, you probably make a pro and con list, spend a lot of time obsessing about decisions that didn't work out, get caught in analysis paralysis, endlessly seek other people's opinions to find just that little bit of extra information that might make you sure, and finally go with your gut. What if there was a better way to make quality decisions so you can think clearly, feel more confident, second-guess yourself less, and ultimately be more decisive and be more productive? Making good decisions doesn't have to be a series of endless guesswork. Rather, it's a teachable skill that anyone can sharpen. In How to Decide, bestselling author Annie Duke and former professional poker player lays out a series of tools anyone can use to make better decisions. You'll learn:   •  To identify and dismantle hidden biases.   •  To extract the highest quality feedback from those whose advice you seek.   •  To more accurately identify the influence of luck in the outcome of your decisions.   •  When to decide fast, when to decide slow, and when to decide in advance.   •  To make decisions that more effectively help you to realize your goals and live your values. Through interactive exercises and engaging thought experiments, this book helps you analyze key decisions you've made in the past and troubleshoot those you're making in the future. Whether you're picking investments, evaluating a job offer, or trying to figure out your romantic life, How to Decide is the key to happier outcomes and fewer regrets.

Annie is the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. She is also a member of the National Board of After-School All-Stars and the Board of Directors of the Franklin Institute. In 2020, she joined the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

Annie Duke

How to Decide

All CEOs have the same responsibilities, such as working with the board, engaging stakeholders, setting direction, and creating a positive culture. What separates the best from the rest is how they approach these tasks. All excelled at some, were good at the rest—and knew the difference. All are world-class integrators. And all applied a distinctive set of mindsets against these responsibilities.Here are six mindsets that characterize great CEOs.

What CEOs Do And Why

In times of uncertainty, it can be tempting to minimize the downside. However, that all but guarantees either mediocrity or decline. Successful CEOs want to avoid making mistakes, of course, but they also act boldly, actively seeking significant opportunities. They raise the aspirations of the company, and they look for intersections where the business and the market meet. In effect, they are excellent futurists and thus can define the right vision.While they will cut their losses if a move is a dud, they stick to the strategy. The vision comes first; financial performance flows from that.

Being Bold

Only one in three strategies is successfully implemented—in large part because change generates resistance. That is why the “soft stuff”—that is, matters related to people and culture—can be the hardest stuff of all to get right.Research has found that companies that solve the soft stuff are more than twice as likely (from 30 to 79 percent) to execute a strategy successfully.1 To carry their organization with them, leaders need to make the case for change, and then keep track of results.

Treat The Soft Stuff As The Hard Stuff

To build high-performing leadership teams, the best CEOs start with roles, not people, asking what the most important jobs are and then finding people who can do those jobs. And they design for overall functionality, bringing in a wide range of expertise. CEOs must engage with each individual while keeping some distance. And, again, the soft stuff counts.

Solve for The Team’s Psychology

The board is the CEO’s boss, but an awkward one—a lot of people, infrequently seen. Like any relationship, the bedrock is trust. That means being open, honest, and prompt about plans and problems. The bad news is, well, bad, but delivering it is also a chance for the board to help, which is its function. CEOs should establish a strong relationship with the lead director and check-in with other directors once or twice a year. Finally, introduce the board to the company by connecting the board to managers.

Directors Helping The Business

Purpose can be difficult to define. At the very least, it should be powerful enough to inspire people, simple enough to be readily understood, and make business sense. And purpose matters: companies with a clear social purpose have significantly outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years.The best CEOs ask themselves why their company exists, and then make purpose an intrinsic part of the business model, knowing that testing strategy against purpose can open up new areas of growth. Leading with purpose can also <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/covid-19-and-the-employee-experience-how-leaders-can-seize-the-moment">enhance employee well-being</a> and build loyalty.

Start With 'Why'

Great CEOs make it a priority to manage themselves to ensure that they are not being pulled apart. That is obviously personal, but we did find some commonalities. The most important is self-discipline, particularly regarding the use of time. Old-school techniques such as lists, stars, and colour coding crop up often as time-management techniques. At the same time, the CEOs also build flexibility into their schedule—to respond to the unexpected or simply to think.Ultimately, managing personal effectiveness is about developing a sense of perspective, and then using that to see into the future.

Do What Only You Can Do

No book can create a great CEO, any more than a boxing manual can produce a Manny Pacquiao. But in business, as in boxing, there is such a thing as good technique. CEOs matter: we calculated that the 200 CEOs we identified created additional economic value of about $5 trillion. By identifying the mindsets that characterize great leadership, we believe that excellence can be cultivated—now and in the future.

What do CEOs do? Why do they do it that way? And what matters most?

productivity

Productivity

business

Business

How to be a great 21st-century CEO

Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun. Most are irregularly shaped, although some are nearly spherical. There are over a million known asteroids, and most can be found in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroid

Comets are large, icy bodies of frozen gases, dust, and rock, with a frozen nucleus. They orbit the Sun on highly elliptical paths. The distinctive tail is caused by the Sun tuning the ice into gas when they orbit close to the Sun. Comets consist of four broad categories:<ul><li>Non-periodic comets: comets that have only passed through the Solar System once</li><li>Short-period comets: comets with an orbit of fewer than 200 years</li><li>Long-period comets: comets with an orbit of more than 200 years</li><li>Lost comets: comets that have 'disappeared' and were not seen at their most recent perihelion (closest point to the Sun)</li></ul>

Comet

As comets or asteroids travel around the Sun, they leave behind a trail of debris in their wake. When Earth's orbit intersects with this debris, thousands of bright trails appear to radiate from one point in the night sky.

Meteor shower

Meteoroids are space rocks. They are fragments and debris from asteroids and comets. These particles continue orbiting the Sun in approximately the same orbit as the parent body from which they came. Over time, they get further away from the parent as the orbit becomes littered with these particles. When a meteoroid enters the Earth's atmosphere and burns up, it leaves a glowing trail in the sky and is known as a meteor - or, more popularly, a shooting star.

Meteoroid

A firebal is when a meteor entering the atmosphere exceeds Venus in terms of brightness. A large fireball will be visible for 5-10 seconds, and if you see a fireball that looks like it was close, be sure to listen out for a rumbling, or 'detonation' type sound. However, a fireball that lasts for more than 10 seconds is likely a satellite or some form of aircraft falling back to Earth.

Fireball

Meteorites are meteoroids that survive the journey to Earth's surface. Meteorites fall every day. However, finding one is incredibly rare. There are four broad types of meteorites:<ul><li>Iron meteorite: those which are almost entirely made of metal</li><li>Stony meteorite: those which are almost entirely made of silicate crystals</li><li>Stony-iron meteorite: those which have similar amounts of both metal and silicate crystals</li></ul>

Meteorite

Each of the known dwarf planets in the Solar System is smaller than our Moon. There are five recognised dwarf planets in our Solar System: Pluto, Ceres, Makemake, Haumea and Eris. Unlike planets, dwarf planets are unable to clear their orbital path.

Dwarf Planet

Know your meteorite from your meteoroid with our handy guide.

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Meteor, asteroid and comet: What’s the difference? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Parallax is the observed displacement of an object caused by the change of the observer's point of view. In astronomy, it is an irreplaceable tool for calculating distances of far away stars.The night sky appears two-dimensional. However, it took astronomers thousands of years to figure out how to measure distances of stars from our planet and create actual three-dimensional maps reflecting the distribution of stars and galaxies in the universe.One of the key methods they use is the so-called parallax, which relies on the same effect as stereoscopic vision.

The Night Sky Isn't Two Dimensional

When it comes to measuring distances to other <a href="https://www.space.com/57-stars-formation-classification-and-constellations.html">stars</a>, the orbit of <a href="https://www.space.com/54-earth-history-composition-and-atmosphere.html">Earth</a> around the <a href="https://www.space.com/58-the-sun-formation-facts-and-characteristics.html">sun</a> provides the baseline for these calculations. Every six months, the planet changes its position with respect to the surrounding <a href="https://www.space.com/52-the-expanding-universe-from-the-big-bang-to-today.html">universe</a> by 186 million miles (300 million kilometers). Since we are making this motion together with Earth, we can (theoretically) observe its effect as tiny circles that stars perform in the sky every year. Due to the vast distances to even the nearest stars, these circles are barely noticeable so detecting and measuring them is extremely difficult.

Measuring Large Distances

The first known astronomical measurement using parallax didn't involve a star but the moon. The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus reportedly used observations of a solar eclipse from two different locations to calculate the distance of Earth's celestial companion.In 1672, Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini and his colleague Jean Richer made simultaneous observations of Mars, with Cassini in Paris and Richer in French Guiana. Cassini subsequently used those measurements to compute the parallax determining Mars' distance from Earth.

The History of Parallax Measurements in Astronomy

A real breakthrough in parallax measurement and therefore in determining distances of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, came with a mission called Hipparchos, after the ancient Greek astronomer that first used the method to estimate the distance of the moon. This mission, launched by ESA in 1989, measured the positions and parallaxes as well as proper motions  for nearly 120,000 stars. The spacecraft orbited Earth for about four years, allowing astronomers to probe the neighbourhood of the sun up to the distance of 300 light-years with the accuracy of 0.001 arcseconds.

Breakthrough in Parallax Measurements and Galaxy Mapping

In 2013, ESA launched a telescope called Gaia that charts the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions of more than one billion stars. That number represents only about 1% of the actual number of stars in the galaxy, but that's enough for astronomers to extrapolate the observations to understand how the Milky Way behaves as a whole. Using Gaia data, they could, for the first time, create a dynamic movie of the galaxy's life over billions of years, uncovering past events but also projecting what will happen in the future.

2013: GAIA Telescope

The light is spread over an area four times larger, and it will be only one-fourth as bright as when the projector was half as far away. If you move the projector three times farther away, the light will cover 9 square feet and appear only one-ninth as bright. If a star measured in this manner happens to be part of a distant cluster, we can assume that all of those stars are the same distance, and we can add them to the library of standard candles.

Learning From The Parallax Effect

Another application of parallax is the reproduction and display of 3D images. The key is to capture 2D images of the subject from two slightly different angles, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/32580-why-do-we-see-in-3-d.html">similar to the way human eyes do</a>, and present them in such a way that each eye sees only one of the two images. Virtual reality gaming headsets, such as the <a href="https://www.livescience.com/44384-oculus-rift-virtual-reality-uses-beyond-gaming.html">Oculus Rift</a> and the <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/htc-vive-virtualy-reality-hands-on,4102.html">HTC Vive</a>, produce 3D virtual environments by projecting an image from a different viewing angle to each eye to simulate a parallax effect.

Using Parallax for 3D Imaging

Parallax is the observed displacement of an object caused by the change of the observer's point of view. In astronomy, it is an irreplaceable tool for calculating distances of far away stars.

space

Space

What Is Parallax?

Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55182-1">general relativity</a>. Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s theory combines space and time into a single entity — “spacetime” — and provides a remarkably intricate explanation of how they both work, at a level unmatched by any other established theory. This theory has existed for more than 100 years and has been experimentally verified to extremely high precision, so physicists are fairly certain it provides an accurate description of the causal structure of our universe.

Space And Time

There are two main issues that make us think these theories and their equations may be unrealistic. The first issue is a practical one: Building a time machine seems to require <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3210-8_3">exotic matter</a>, which is matter with negative energy. All the matter we see in our daily lives has positive energy-matter with negative energy is not something you can just find lying around. From quantum mechanics, we know that such matter can theoretically be created, but <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.51.4277">in too small quantities and for too short times</a>.

Arguments Against Time Travel: Exotic Matter

There is an observation that time travel seems to contradict logic, in the form of time travel paradoxes. There are several types of such paradoxes, but the most problematic are consistency paradoxes.A popular trope in science fiction, consistency paradoxes happen whenever there is a certain event that leads to changing the past, but the change itself prevents this event from happening in the first place.

Arguments Against Time Travel: Contradicting Logic

Consider a scenario where I enter my time machine, use it to go back in time five minutes, and destroy the machine as soon as I get to the past. Now that I destroyed the time machine, it would be impossible for me to use it five minutes later.But if I cannot use the time machine, then I cannot go back in time and destroy it. Therefore, it is not destroyed, so I can go back in time and destroy it. The time machine is destroyed if and only if it is not destroyed. Since it cannot be both destroyed and not destroyed simultaneously, this scenario is inconsistent and paradoxical.

Destroying The Time Machine After Going Five Minutes In The Past

Time travellers are usually warned not to make significant changes to the past and to avoid meeting their past selves to avoid creating a paradox. Examples of this may be found in many time travel movies, such as the Back to the Future trilogy.But in physics, a paradox is not an event that can actually happen — it is a purely theoretical concept that points towards an inconsistency in the theory itself. In other words, consistency paradoxes don’t merely imply time travel is a dangerous endeavour, they imply it simply cannot be possible.

Eliminating the Paradoxes

<ul><li>This physics theory essentially states that you can travel to the past, but you cannot change it.</li><li>If I tried to destroy my time machine five minutes in the past, I would find that it is impossible to do so. The laws of physics would somehow conspire to preserve consistency.</li><li>This theory has many loopholes and is mired with paradoxes and inconsistencies.</li></ul>

Self-Consistency Conjecture

Allowing for multiple histories (or in more familiar terms, parallel timelines) can resolve the paradoxes that are eclipsing all the other theories. In fact, it can resolve any paradox you throw at it.The idea is very simple. When I exit the time machine, I exit into a different timeline. In that timeline, I can do whatever I want, including destroying the time machine, without changing anything in the original timeline I came from. Since I cannot destroy the time machine in the original timeline, which is the one I actually used to travel back in time, there is no paradox.

The Theory That Holds Its Ground: Multiple Timelines

<ul><li>Time travel could be possible, but only if our universe can allow multiple histories to coexist. So, can it?</li><li>Quantum mechanics certainly seems to imply so, at least if you subscribe to Everett’s “many-worlds” interpretation, where one history can “split” into multiple histories, one for each possible measurement outcome.</li><li>General relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that time travel might be possible, but if it is, then multiple histories must also be possible.</li></ul>

The Multiverse

Time travel is a true possibility but the condition is even more mindblowing than the simulation theory! We must have infinite parallel timelines coexisting.

After working on time travel paradoxes for the last three years, I have become increasingly convinced that time travel could be possible.

Time travel could be possible, but only if parallel timelines can coexist

It is vital to take ownership of your own career, but other factors can make the path smoother, such as managers who nurture instead of stifling your goals and finding a company with growth potential. Many employees become myopic about the day-to-day responsibilities in their careers. However, if you can find the right company and the right manager, you can carve out a suitable role for yourself.

Career growth is inherently multi-player

How to evaluate if a company will foster career growth: <ul><li>Take the time to consider your career motivations. It will help if you focus on more than a new title or a salary increase.</li><li>If you look at a five or ten-year horizon, but your vision is foggy, focus on what you're good at, what you enjoy, and how that correlates to career output.</li><li>Make the most out of the informational interview. If you see someone in a role you'd like to learn more about that aligns with your desired output, try to spend some time talking with them about their career.</li></ul>

Career growth: Tips for candidates

When evaluating whether a startup has a promising trajectory:<ul><li>Pay attention to the investment cycle - who has invested, how much, who's leading the round, who's leading another round?</li><li>Keep an eye out for movement in the C-Suite.</li><li>Find out how the particular role you’re looking at fits into the company’s growth trajectory. For example, are they investing in cloud and security? Is there global expansion happening?</li><li>You want to see if people have been growing in their careers at a company that’s at least a couple of years old.</li></ul>

When assessing a company, look for these mile markers

<ul><li>Ask about the one, three, and five-year future of the company.</li><li>Probe their goals and what they're striving for. Do they talk about strategy and values, or are they executing as well?</li><li>Where do they see their revenue growth coming from next year?</li><li>Do they see the company going public?</li><li>Ask about the career path for the role you're interviewing for.</li></ul>

Put career growth front and center in the interview

<ul><li>What initiatives were rolled out that changed the course of the product or the GTM strategy?</li><li>What’s the most common reason people leave here and what’s the company doing to rectify it? </li><li>What are the most common reasons to promote people here?</li><li>How would you break down what I’d spend an average day doing? </li><li>What percentage of your role tends to be more tactical versus more strategic?</li><li>What metrics do I need to achieve to be able to be successful in my role?</li></ul>

Questions for candidates to ask in an interview

<ul><li>Don't limit yourself to roles that have already been created. Instead, see where your own skills sets, passions and goals overlap with opportunities.</li><li>Keep in mind that the greatest opportunities for growth are at the intersection of the needs of the business and flexing your metaphorical muscles. You need to have data behind your proposal.</li><li>When you make your case for taking on a new role, consider why they would say yes to your suggestion.</li></ul>

How to grow your career by aligning the company needs with your aspirations

Hiring managers may mistakenly see job-hopping as a red flag. It could be that they job-hop because their role and career are growing rather than a lack of focus. <ul><li>However, be wary of people who are defensive when you question them about their changing jobs. </li><li>See it as a red flag if they don't click with the manager at most of their jobs.</li></ul>

Tips for hiring managers: How to find candidates with big ambitions

<ul><li>Tell me about a time when you achieved success entirely on your own?</li><li>What are you working on getting better at? Tell me about a time you’ve failed. </li><li>What motivates you?</li><li>We love professionals who want to grow into their niche, and we also value those who want to climb the ranks. Which are you?</li></ul>

Questions for managers to ask in an interview

<ul><li>Set the tone. Career growth is the report’s responsibility, not the manager’s. Let your hire know to take control of their own desk.</li><li>Keep them challenged. Find out what motivates them and explain that uplevel doesn't always include promotion. It means growing skillsets and capabilities.</li><li>Assign a rotating Devil's advocate. Assign a person to challenge the team to think with different frameworks.</li><li>Create the culture within your team. Your job as the leader is to set the tone.</li></ul>

How to retain your top talent

<ul><li>Lead with authenticity. Refrain from startup cliches. "We’re the next big startup. We’re the next unicorn.” Instead, state what makes your company original.</li><li>Career development often falls to the bottom for startups. However, you have to lay the foundation for future building blocks. Consider what employees have been in the same role for 18 months. They may not speak up until they finally quit.</li><li>Invest in people who can take your career development plan to the next level.</li></ul>

Tips for companies: How to craft a company culture that attracts and retains top talent

How to grow your career for years to come

After an 11-year career as an HR exec at Splunk, Shreya Iyer unpacks her comprehensive guide to startup career growth, with tailored tips for candidates approaching career planning, managers looking to retain top talent, and startups carving out their career development plans. 

career

Career

humanresources

Human Resources

"Take Control of Your Desk" — Career Tips for ICs, Managers & Founders

Schools vary in their capacity, goals, resources, and focus, leaving considerable guesswork to applicants about where they might get in. Applying to more colleges, then, is a relatively cheap way to up your chances of finding a match that satisfies three criteria:<ul><li>You get in</li><li>You’ll be happy and successful there</li><li>You’ll have the opportunity get merit aid and financial assistance (if needed).</li></ul>

The Case for Applying to More Colleges

People might wonder about the downsides of applying to more schools, such as the cost. But, while each additional application costs money, schools will often waive the fee in cases where it would create a financial hardship.For example, Harvard waives the fee for students whom the fee would be a hardship, without any additional documentation required. If college application costs are a problem for a student or their family, waiving the fee is an option they should explore.

Obstacle #1: The cost

People wonder if rolling the dice too many times, hoping to get lucky, will land them at a school that is too hard and leave them worse off than had they applied to a smaller pool. But that is not what the evidence shows. In one experiment, economists Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner nudged high-achieving, low-income students to apply to more selective colleges and found that their academic performance was just as good as the performance of students in the control group, who attended less selective schools on average.

Obstacle #2: The gamble

People might wonder whether it’s just too time-consuming to apply to more schools. From a behavioral economics perspective, it’s easy to understand why. Even though parts of the college application process have become much easier with the common app, time costs remain a real concern, as some schools differ in, for example, essay requirements.Applicants should think hard about the costs versus the benefits. In terms of lifetime value, graduating from college is important.

Obstacle #3: The time commitment

With growing concerns of college debt, applying to more schools has the added appeal of increasing the chances that students will find a strong financial aid package. In fact, many applicants with financial needs might be surprised by some of the aid packages they are eligible to receive should they proactively seek more information.

College debt concerns

education

Learning & Education

How Many Colleges Should You Apply to?

Much of this decision-making is difficult. Weighing options is especially hard due to certain biases that can lead you astray.These biases can include over-or underestimating the likelihood of something happening to you based on whether your friends have experienced something similar or how much you see it covered in the media. Another reason why decision-making is hard is the propensity to overweigh the instant gratification or the instant pain of a decision over the long-term consequences.

Life is a neverending series of decisions

Without clear objectives for what you want to achieve with a decision, you might focus on the wrong things.Ask yourself, “What do I hope to achieve by addressing this choice?” and focus on aspects that aren’t easily quantifiable. This can be applied to both big and smaller decisions.

Zero in on what you really want

How to be a better decision maker: What to do if you regularly wish you could hire someone to make all your choices for you.

Here’s what to do if you regularly wish you could hire someone to make all your choices for you.