Mensa76

10/15/2026

Blaming the pizza sounds good to me. 🤣

10/15/2026

In 1969, Laurence J. Peter proposed a management principle that remains one of the most uncomfortable truths in organizational design: in a hierarchical system, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.

The master mechanic becomes a sub-par foreman. The brilliant engineer becomes a struggling manager. At each stage, people are promoted because they succeeded at their previous role—until they reach a position where their skill set no longer applies, and there they remain stuck.

The result? Over time, positions in a hierarchy tend to be occupied by employees who have reached their personal limit of capability, while the actual heavy lifting is accomplished by those who haven't yet been promoted past theirs.

It's more than a joke about bad managers. It's a serious question about how organizations choose who moves upward.

The Structural Solution: Promote based on demonstrated capacity for the next role (not just reward for the current one), and build lateral technical paths that allow top talent to advance without forcing them into management.

Have you ever been promoted into a role that required a completely different kind of skill?

10/15/2026

In 1999, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted an experiment that permanently changed how we understand human perception:

They asked participants to watch a short video of two teams passing a basketball—one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black.

𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗸: Count the exact number of passes made by the team wearing white.

While participants were intently counting, a person in a full gorilla suit walked right into the middle of the court, faced the camera, thumped its chest, and walked off screen. 𝗛𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗮 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝟵 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝘀.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁? Over 𝟱𝟬% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 counting the passes completely failed to notice the gorilla! 🦍

When shown the video again without counting, they were stunned. Most insisted the gorilla had been edited in later.

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻? This phenomenon is called 𝗜𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀.

When your brain allocates high-focus attention to a specific task (counting passes), your visual cortex aggressively filters out "irrelevant" sensory data—even when that data is a 200lb gorilla thumping its chest in front of you.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲: We assume we see the world as it is. In reality, we only see what we are looking for.

When you focus too intensely on a single target or metric, what "gorillas" might you be completely missing in your work, relationships, or decisions?

Have you ever experienced a moment where you missed something shockingly obvious right in front of you? Tell us your story in the comments! 👇

10/14/2026

So that's why I watch two channels at once: one channel to watch the show that I want to watch, and a second channel to watch during ads.

***ETA1: to clarify, autistic people are equally susceptible to propaganda as neurotypical people, but research suggests that autistic people are often less susceptible to certain types of misleading marketing, decoys, and subtle emotional cues in advertising compared to neurotypical individuals.

Traditional advertising being less effective:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-fallible-mind/201708/why-advertising-falls-flat-in-individuals-autism

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797617694867

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02103/full

Not immune to propaganda:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/13546805.2024.2399505

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/13546805.2024.2443576

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25739581261485775

***ETA2: Neurodivergent is not synonymous with autism, though autism is a type of neurodivergence. Neurodivergence is an umbrella term that covers many different diagnoses, including ADHD, learning disabilities, Tourette's, autism, synesthesia, etc.

10/14/2026