A Bucket Er­ror is when mul­ti­ple differ­ent con­cepts or vari­ables are in­cor­rectly lumped to­gether in one’s mind as a sin­gle con­cept/​vari­able, po­ten­tially lead­ing to dis­tor­tions of one’s think­ing. Bucket Er­rors are re­lated to Fal­la­cies of Com­pres­sion.

The term, Bucket Er­ror, was in­tro­duced in “Flinch­ing away from truth” is of­ten about *pro­tect­ing* the episte­mol­ogy where an ex­am­ple is given of a child who re­fuses to be­lieve that they made a spel­ling mis­take. The child is un­will­ing to be­lieve this fact be­cause they be­lieve hav­ing made a spel­ling mis­take is in­com­pat­i­ble with be­com­ing a writer which is their dream. “Be­com­ing a writer” and “never mak­ing spel­ling mis­takes” are lumped in the same bucket de­spite in fact be­ing sep­a­rate vari­ables.

Bucket Er­rors are similar to the con­cepts of equiv­o­ca­tion, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in Bud­dhism, or fu­sion/​de­fu­sion in mod­ern psy­chother­apy. See: Fu­sion and Equiv­o­ca­tion in Korzyb­ski’s Gen­eral Se­man­tics.

Re­lated Pages: Com­part­men­tal­iza­tion, Distinctions