# Avoidable Stupidity ### Notes * Certain circumstances are nearly guaranteed to make mistakes. You can be the smartest person in the room, but certain *predictable situations* will eliminate this advantage. Why? Certain situations overload our mental processing capabilities. We can define stupidity as dismissing or overlooking conspicuously crucial information * What are the situations we can identify in advance that increase the odds of stupidity? 1. Are you under mental or physical stress? 2. Are you distracted by something in the moment? 3. Are you operating in a group? 4. Are you in a rush or feeling urgency? 5. Are you operating outside of your normal environment? * We turn down the radio when lost in a car because we are outside of our normal environment and need to concentrate. 6. Is there an expert around? 7. Do you have too much information? > "What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of it's recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" - Herbert Simon