# Mental Potholes
The organising rule: you cannot out-think a bias while it is running. By the time you feel it, it has already picked the answer and your reasoning is decorating it. Every defense has to be installed before the moment, while nothing is at stake. So every fix in the guide is a named mechanism (a number, a deadline, a condition that decides for you), never a resolution.
Part One: Potholes About the Past
| # | Pothole | One line |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Sunk Cost Fallacy | What you already paid is not a reason. |
| 02 | Loss Aversion | Getting back to even is not a plan. |
| 03 | Commitment and Consistency | You told people, so now you are stuck. |
| 04 | Narrative Fallacy | Luck, rewritten afterwards as a plan. |
| 05 | Anchoring | The first number owns the whole conversation. |
All three of the first entries are the same machine wearing different coats: each converts a decision about the future into a defense of the past, and each is beaten by writing the exit condition down before entering.
Part Two: Potholes About the Odds
| # | Pothole | One line |
|---|---|---|
| 06 | Base Rate Neglect | Your situation is less different than it feels. |
| 07 | Survivorship Bias | The ones who failed did not post about it. |
| 08 | Ergodicity | Good odds still ruin you if the path goes through zero. |
| 09 | Overconfidence | "Pretty sure" is not a number and cannot be scored. |
| 10 | Planning Fallacy | Everything takes about twice as long. |
These three say the same thing from three directions: the sample being reasoned from was filtered before it arrived. Ergodicity is the load-bearing one, and the only entry whose fix has no acceptable second answer.
Part Three: Potholes About Yourself
| # | Pothole | One line |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Confirmation Bias | A belief you cannot lose is not a belief. |
| 12 | Stated vs Revealed Preference | The calendar is the real answer. |
| 13 | Incentive-Caused Bias | Follow what the advice pays them. |
| 14 | Deferral Dressed as Optionality | A door you never walk through is a wall with a knob. |
| 15 | The Lollapalooza | Four biases pointing the same way at once. |
The Six Questions
- If I were handed this position today, cold, would I take it at this price?
- What would have to happen for me to be wrong, and am I out when it does?
- How often does this work for people like me, and what do I have that they did not?
- Who tried this and failed, and why are they not in my examples?
- If this hits the bad side three times in a row, am I still in the game?
- What does the person telling me this lose if they are wrong?