The Curse of Category
September 21, 2018·0 comments·In Brief
You know the difference between a blueberry and a pokeberry. You know one is safe and one is poison. You've picked from that bush before, successfully. So why would you eat the poison? The answer isn't ignorance. It's something more insidious about how confidence works.
- The confident mistake happens in familiar places. When every surface detail matches your past experience, your brain stops checking. The location itself becomes permission to skip verification.
- Knowledge doesn't protect you from context collapse. You can know the facts cold and still fail catastrophically because you're not actually evaluating the situation. You're pattern-matching against memory.
- Type 1 errors are the ones that kill you. False positives, where you're absolutely sure you're right, cause blowups. Type 2 errors (missing good opportunities) are painful but survivable.
- Success in one location teaches you exactly the wrong lesson. Past wins in a familiar sector or strategy create a blind spot that feels like expertise but is actually complacency wearing a mask.
- The real question isn't how to spot the poison but how to stop trusting the shelf it sits on. What habits of thought are you borrowing from past success that are now working against you?
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