Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
--Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
To the extent that the above phenomenon tends to occur, here’s a fun story that attempts to explain it:
At every moment our brain can choose something to think about (like “that exchange I had with Alice last week”). How does the chosen thought get selected from the thousands of potential thoughts? Let’s imagine that the brain assigns an “importance score” to each potential thought, and thoughts with a larger score are more likely to be selected. Since there are thousands of thoughts to choose from, the optimizer’s curse makes our brain overestimate the importance of the thought that it ends up selecting.
--Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
To the extent that the above phenomenon tends to occur, here’s a fun story that attempts to explain it:
At every moment our brain can choose something to think about (like “that exchange I had with Alice last week”). How does the chosen thought get selected from the thousands of potential thoughts? Let’s imagine that the brain assigns an “importance score” to each potential thought, and thoughts with a larger score are more likely to be selected. Since there are thousands of thoughts to choose from, the optimizer’s curse makes our brain overestimate the importance of the thought that it ends up selecting.