Too Soon To Stop

How similar are these things?

1) We stop looking for something once we've found it (used for the badly worded phrase "it was in the last place I looked").

2) Stop looking for an answer when we find something that confirms what we already hold to be true. In other words, when we found what we're looking for, we stop, just like in #1.

It seems to me that we humans have a tendency to stop looking both when it's proper and when it's not by unknowingly and mistakenly treating these scenarios like they are the same. It's likely more complicated, of course, but there might be something there to consider.

Shrinking Degrees of Separation

One of the largely unnoticed side-effects of a shrinking number of people with increasing wealth is that true competition goes away because they can't help but know each other. It would be a near impossibility for a small group of ultra-rich people to have next-to-no degrees of separation (not withstanding Kevin Bacon).

In a society like this, every medium-to-major transaction is always going to be an 'inside job.' It's not possible for it to be otherwise.