This is a Lexicon entry: the mechanism, when it shows up, and the countermeasure. The full correction, with real-world cases and the audit prompt, hasn't been written yet.
Definition
The tendency to treat your own direct experience as a reliable guide to how the world generally works, despite that experience being a vanishingly small and non-random sample. What you have personally lived feels vivid and certain; statistical reality about the wider population feels abstract by comparison. The result is confident generalisation from a sample of one.
When it shows up
When drawing general conclusions from your own experience; when treating personal history as a reliable guide to how the world works. In expert witness testimony: when a specialist forgets what they did not know at the time of an event. In code documentation: when a developer cannot reconstruct the reasoning behind their own decisions three months later.
Failure mode
Confident generalisations built on a sample of one. Universal claims from a personal experience that represents an infinitesimal fraction of human history.
Countermeasure
Ask: "How representative is my experience of the full distribution of possible experiences?" Actively seek out accounts of lives very different from your own before generalising.
Related traps
Also connected in the map3 more, locked
Credit & first seen
PopularizedCoined/popularized by Gurwinder Bhogal (The Prism - gurwinder.blog). First heard on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson () source ↗
Also revealed
Entry #117 of 631 in The Lexicon · see the full Lexicon