I would say that one of the most important "meta" ideas, that comes up in many places, is that your conscious mind and rationality are largely a veneer/illusion

I would say that one of the most important "meta" ideas, that comes up in many places, is that your conscious mind and rationality are largely a veneer/illusion over an "animal" brain. Emotion comes first, then thought. This has consequences in the real world, including economic ones. And it was something that people got wrong -- e.g. Enlightenment thinkers overstated how different and privileged humans are in this respect. Take the example of optical illusions. Even though I can tell how the illusion works, and you rationally know that two lines are the same length, and you can literally measure it yourself with a ruler -- your mind will still see them as different [1]. This is a benign example, but there are lots of other examples where "knowing" that you are wrong doesn't prevent you from acting as if you held the wrong beliefs. If you are an investor, you should be familiar with the concept of "loss aversion", which is easily verified with an experiment and replicated. Daniel Kahneman won a (deserved) Nobel Prize for many interesting phenonema with real economic consequences. Intelligent people are always questioning their psychology: http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us I don't know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing. I assert that certain ideas from psychology have permeated into the public consciousness -- and 200 or 300 years ago, you would not hear non-psychologists talking in this fashion. You can do very repeatable psychological experiments on how people perceive quantities of numbers and so forth. For evolutionary reasons, there are lots of quick "short circuits" in your brain that perform resource allocation and risk assessment, but they are not adapted for the modern world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion