Key concepts

On Facebook, a friend asks:

What are some concepts you wish were more widely understood?

He offered an example:

• Externalities

Another person offered:

• Confirmation bias

Which inspired me to produce a whole list, which I'm now adding to progressively:

• Nothing scales: square-cube law, network effects, Metcalfe's Law, etc
• Market failures
  • externality
  • non-excludability
  • non-rivalry
  • increasing returns
  • adverse selection
  • moral hazard
  • maldistribution
  • miscalculation
  • monopoly power by sellers
  • monopsony power by buyers
  • race to the bottom
  • expectational disequilibrium
  • rationing disequilibrium
• Bullshit
  • Frankfurt's definition
  • If a source lies to you once, it is never a source of information again
  • One-way hash arguments
  • Deceiving us has become an industrial process
  • The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
• Consent
• Survivor bias
• The scientific method, in particular falsifiability
• Hanlon's Razor
• Pareto distributions (and how networks produce them)
• Multiple equilibria
• Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy
• Distributed computation
• Positive liberties (as opposed to negative liberties)
• The tyranny of structurelessness
• Korman's Law
• “Expertise is knowing where common sense is wrong”
• Hagbard's Law
• Systemic injustice
• Dunning-Kruger
• Correlation versus causation
• Incentives
  • Perverse incentives
  • Campbell's Law aka “juking the stats”
  • Reflexivity
• Nothing scales

Over time I'm going to make more of these into links, but if you don't recognize some of these, I recommend looking them up.