Ben's Book Blog

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kannehman

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 22:50:00 +0000

Kannehman is a giant in the field of economic psychology, and is a proponent that humans are not rational econs, but rather emotionally driven creatures that use a set of heuristics to base our quick judgments. By showing us how these heuristics work, we can start to understand where they are appropriate and where they’re not in a modern world. This gives us the opportunity to make better decisions and lead happier lives.

What every politician does during the debate
The essence of the intuitive heuristic: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. p12

People who are cognitively busy (performing system 2 tasks) are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgements in social situations. The cognitive load loosens system2’s hold on behavior. A few drinks have the same effec, as does a sleepless night... p41

Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among subjects who ingested less glucose during the test, leading researchers to hypothesize that system2’s draw on energy lessens the degree with which it can deal with error checking of system1. p43

Are you good enough to get into Harvard, MIT or Princeton?
A bat and ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs a $1 more than the ball. How much is the ball?
50% of Harvard, MIT and Princeton students gave the intuitive and incorrect answer. At less selective universities the failure to check was in excess of 80%. p45
The answer is a nickel.

The printed word, how to make it stick.
If your message is to be printed, use high quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and the background. If you use color, you’re more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than middling shades of green, yellow or blue. If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, don’t use complex langauge where simpler language will do. Try to make your message memorable. Put them in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth (Woes unite foes vs. Woes unite enemies). If you quote a source, choose one with an easy to pronounce name. p64

Want to avoid mistakes, wear glasses to give you blurry vision
Cognitive strain (making system 2 work) from whatever source (like a fuzzy or small font) helps reject incorrect intuitive answers. 90% of students who saw the normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. p65

Display advertising works!
When words or images are shown so quickly that observers are not aware of having seen them, they still end up liking the words or pictures that were presented more frequently. This exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees. p67

Why? The consequences of repeated exposures benefit the organism in its relations to the immediate animate and inanimate envrionment. They allow the organism to distinguish objects and habitats that are safe from those that are not... The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System1 has a long evolutionary history. p67

Happier people are more creative
A happy mood loosens the control of system 2 over performance, people become more intuitive and creative, but less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. p69

The brain is wired for being religious
We percieve the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. These two modes of causation make it natural to for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies. p77

System 1 doesn’t keep track of the alternatives that it rejects, even the fact that there were alternatives. Conscious doubt, requiring maintenance of incompatible interpretations at the same time demands the mental effort of system 2. p80

Want to avoid quick decisions. Frown.
Frowning increases the vigilance of system2 and reduces the overconfidence and the reliance of system1. p152

There’s one thing you can do when you have doubts about the quality of the evidence: let your judgments of probability stay close to the base rate. p153

Stereotyping may not be statistically wrong, just morally frowned upon.
Stereotyping can improve the accuracy of judgment in some contexts. The social norm against stereotyping has been highly benefical in creating a more civilized and equal society, but it is important to remember that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance of stereotyping is laudable, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that costs exist is not scientifically defensible. p169

Teaching with facts and statistics makes little impact
Even when students are made aware of the base rate explicitly do they learn the results in a way that changes their thinking? The answer is straightforward: they learn nothing at all! Their predictions are the same as those who are not given the base rate information... For teachers of psychology the implications of this study are disheartening. When we teach our students about the behavior of people in this experiment we expect them to learn something they had not known before; we wish to change how they think. This goal was not accomplished and there’s no reason to believe that the results would have been different if they had chosen another surprising psychological experiment. Indeed, similar findings have been found. p173

You must surprise them with a specific case (story)
To teach students any psychology you must surprise. But which surprise will do? When presented with a surprising statistical fact, they learn nothing at all. But when presented with a surprising individual case the immediately make the generalization and incorporate that into their thinking. p174

How to think slowly...
1. Start with the base rate or an estimate of it
2. Determine your guess that matches your intuitive impression of the evidence
3. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and the thing metric you’re guessing.
4. If the correlation is 30%, move 30% of the distance from the base rate to your intuitive guess. p190

The Explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are
concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent,
stupidity and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking
events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed
to happen. p199

In a well ordered and predictable world, the correlation would be
perfect and the stronger CEO would be found to lead the more
successful firm in 100% of the pairs. If the relative success of
similar firms was determined entirely by factors that the CEO doesn't
control (call them luck), you would find the more successful firm led
by the weaker CEO 50% of the time. A correlation of .30 implies that
you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60%
of the pairs - an improvement of a mere 10% over random guessing,
hardly the grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.
p205

Most stellar performances regress to the mean
The profitability and stock returns gap between the outstanding firms
and the less successful one from 'Built to Last' shrank to almost
nothing in the period following the study. The average profitability
of the companies identified in the famous 'In search of excellence'
dropped sharply as well within a short time. A study of ''Fortunes
Most Admired Companies" finds that over a 20 year period, the firms
with the worst ratings went on to earn much higher returns than the
most admired firms. p207

History is dominated by randomness
it is hard to think of the history of the 20th century without
bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But there was a moment
in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a 50/50
chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female.
Compounding the 3 events, there was a 1/8th probability of a 20th
century without any of these three villains, and its impossible to
argue that history would have been the same in their absence. The
fertilization of these 3 eggs had momentous consequences, and it makes
a joke of the idea that long term developments are predictable. p218

Let the computer decide
The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical
(algorithmic) predictions has increased to roughly 200, but the score
in the contest has not changed. About 60% have shown significantly
better accuracy for algorithms. The other 40% scored a draw in
accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules,
which are normally less expensive. No exception has been convincingly
documented. p223

If you're serious about hiring the best possible person for the job
this is what you should do.
1. Select a few traits that are pre-reqs for success in the position
(technical skill, engaging personality, reliability, etc.) Don't over
do it, 6 is a good number.
2. Make sure the traits are independent and you can assess them
reliably by asking a few factual questions.
3. Make a list of those questions and for each trait think about how
you will score them on a 1 to 5 scale.
4. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one
trait at a time, scoring each before you move on on the next one.
Don't skip around.
5. Evaluate each candidate by adding up the 6 scores.
6. Firmly resolve that you will hire the person with the highest score
and don't overrule this by intuition. p232

Set goals and strive to achieve them
I have changed my mind about well being. The goals that people set for
themselves are so important to what they do and how they feel about it
that an exclusive focus on experienced well being is not tenable. We
can't hold a concept of well being that ignores what people want. It
is also true that a concept of well being that ignores how people feel
in the moment and only focuses on how they feel about their whole life
is also untenable. We must accept the complexities of a hybrid view,
in which the well being of both selves is considered. p402

How you process time
The central fact of our existence is that time is the ultimate finite
resource, but the remembering self ignores that reality. The neglect
of duration combined with the peak end rule causes a bias that favors
a short period of joy over a long period of moderate happiness. The
mirror image of the same bias makes us fear a short period of intense
pain over a long period of mild unpleasantness but tolerable
suffering. Duration neglect makes us prone to accept mild suffering
because the end will be better, and it favors giving up an opportunity
for a long happy period if it is likely to have a poor ending. p409

Bayes Rule Explained:
Your friend tested positive for a rare disease where only 1 in 600 of
cases sent for testing actually has the disease. The test is fairly
accurate; its likelihood ratio is 25:1, which means the probability
that a person with the disease will test positive is 25 times higher
than a person without the disease. The odds that your friend has the
disease has rise from 1/600 before the test to only 25/600 post the
test, or just 4%. 25 times higher than before, but not a certainty.
p461

Evolution for Everyone by David Sloane Wilson (***)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:14:00 +0000

A book that will help you extend the concept of evolution to tackle problems beyond biology into the human drama of your social world including economics, business, and relationships. Why would evolution matter in these areas? Because these aspects of our lives were subject to the same rules of evolution as our bodies and behaviors. We evolved to be social creatures, and so our social constructs could benefit from an analysis centered on evolution.

Don't make a monkey out of yourself

Recent Harris poll of Americans adults showed that 54% believe that humans didn't develop from earlier species, that is up from 46% in 1994. p2

Looks like these people are not developing either!

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Or the chicken from the hell?

A scientist/farmer wanted to increase egg production and tried to do it in 2 ways. The first method involved selecting the most productive hens from each of a number cages to breed the next generation. The second method involved selecting all the hens from the most productive cages to breed. After 6 generations, the results were ghastly and clear. In the cage of the first group, only 3 hens were left out of nine; the other 6 had been murdered. The 3 survivors had plucked each other nearly to death during their incessant attacks. Egg production plummeted of course. What happened? Selecting for the most productive member of each cage had selected for hens that suppress the output of the other hens in their cage. They are not super egg layers, but rather the meanest hens. 6 generations of breeding had produced a nation of psychopaths. In the second cage, egg production was way up. By selecting whole groups, the farmer had also chosen to select against aggression as well. p34

Why pregnant teens are rational

In Chicago neighborhoods with the shortest life expectancy, women tended to start having children at an earlier age… Homocide rates correlate most to income inequality, not household income. Men especially become dissatisfied when they perceive themselves as having less than others, regardless of how much they actually have. Such an environment rewards men to take extreme risks to obtain status. Murder is a consequence. This leads to an unstable environment with lower life expectancy. Women respond by taking care of immediate needs and reproducing early. p96

Why is there a division between cells that are designed to reproduce (germ line) and the cells that are destined to build the body (somatic line) that takes place early in development?

To minimize the number of mutation producing cell division within the germ line (that's why a baby girl is born with all the eggs she'll ever have), and to ensure that the somatic line is selected exclusively for its ability to enhance the fitness of the whole organism, rather than competing to become gametes.

Why are somatic cells designed to self destruct after a finite number of divisions?

To prevent cheating strategies from evolving over a period of many cell divisions

Why are the rules of meiosis so elaborate?

It is the process of forming the germ cells (eggs and sperm). This stage of life is especially vulnerable to differential replication, so meiosis is elaborately designed to give each gene an equal chance at becoming a gamete. p136

Are you calling my neighborhood a rotten log?

Ed Wilson describes a social insect colony as a factory within a fortress, against which solitary insects cannot compete. An ant colony moving into a rotten log is like Walmart moving into your neighborhood: the mom and pop businesses must go. p145

When to voice your opinion and when to tow the line

A good decision making process begins with an alternative generating phase, followed by an evaluation phase, leading to rejection of all but the final decision. It is appropriate to argue for minority positions early in the prices. Only when these same arguments are made late during decision making phase does that person suffer a loss in status. Group leader should also refrain from sharing their opinion early in the process to avoid groupthink during ideation. p211

Arie Krugman and Donna Webster

We are not fated by our genes to engage in violent conflict.

Even though this argument is often stated in terms of genes, it makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective because no single behavior is adaptive across all environmental conditions. Bloody conflict is not everywhere. I does indeed thrive under some conditions. The Vikings of Iceland were among the fiercest people on earth, and now they're among the most peaceful. Same genetic stock. p285

The average person is a facultative sociopath

We might not be fated by our genes to engage in violent conflict, but we are prepared by them. There is a rich anthropological, archeological, and historical record of murder and mayhem, and ample psychological evidence that we are hardwired to distinguish between us and them, and to behave inhumanely at the slightest provocation. Everyone is thus susceptible to this us vs. them reaction from our evolved tendencies. If we want to avoid this kind of facultative sociopathy, we need to avoid pushing the wrong psychological buttons. p286

Watch out for the invisible hand.

There are billions of ways for a human society to self organize. Of these, only a tiny fraction are adaptive at the group level. The simple rules that enable people to organize into adaptive societies evolved by cultural and genetic group selection over a long period of time. Other simple rules that tend to disrupt society evolved by within group selection. The rules that exist in one society need not exist in another. We will never understand the relatively simple rules that cause people to self organize into adaptive societies until we study them from an evolutionary perspective. p289

Evil aliens need not apply

How many times have you heard that the world would come together as one if evil aliens descended upon us? If the earth was faced with global destruction, some of us would surely sacrifice more than others, some would engage rampant profiteering, some would help the aliens in an effort to save their own skins, and so on. Increasing the scale and intensity of the threat would not eliminate these differentials. p289

References from book:

Spicy articles: Paul Sherman

How sensitive are you: www.hsperson.com

Amoebas!: dictybase.org

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky

Becoming Adult: How Teenagers prepare for the world of work: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:16:00 +0000

Design
Ponder the humble toaster. At most a person uses it less than 15 minutes/day. The remaining 1425 minutes of the day, the toaster is merely on display. 1% is devoted to utility, and 99% is devoted to significance. Why shouldn’t the toaster be beautiful? p80

Hospital rooms with ample natural light lead to less pain medication, and 21% fewer drug costs... Improving a school’s physical environment could increase test scores by 11% p82

Review Design Magazines for ideas...
Ambidexrous Design Magazine
How Design
iD Mag
Or visit http://www.ideo.com/

Good design is full of CRAP...
Contrast (if elements aren’t the same, make them very different), Repetition (repeating visual elements strengthens unity), Alignment (everything should be connected with another visual element on the page), Proximity (related items grouped together) p97

Story

StoryCorps
Listen and record the stories of your life and others around you.

Attend local story telling festivals.
Bay Area Storing Telling (Late Spring)

Read these books
Story by Robert Mckee
Stealing Fire from the Gods by James Bonnet
Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson

Symphony
Draw portraits with only 5 lines
Keep a metaphor log
Search for problems for existing solutions
a. where else would it work
b. flip it around, change the default

Read these books
Power of 10 by Charles Eames
Dialogue: the act of thinking together by William Isaacs
Metaphor by George Lakoff
No Waste by Laboratorio de creacion Maldeojo

Empathy
Empathy Quotient
Systematizing Quotient
Spot the Fake Smiles
Mind the Eyes

Play
www.laughteryoga.org

How funny are you?

Meaning
People have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. - Robert William Fogel, Nobel Laureate

But Out!
Write down some changes you want in your life, and what stops you from doing it.
I want to lose weight, but I can’t stop eating my favorite foods.
Now change the ‘but’ into ‘and... so’, rewriting the statement
I want to lose weight, and I can’t stop eating my favorite foods, so I allow myself to indulge once a week with my favorites.

Read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl

48 Laws of Power by Rober Greene ****

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:21:00 +0000

The follow up that Machivelli would have loved to write. The book is something of a guidebook but it is also a joy to read because of the 100s of historical references and fables to back up all of the dictums. If you end up becoming more powerful as a result – well, more power to you. But you’re guaranteed to be entertained by all of the interesting backstories.

Being perfectly honest will inevitably hurt and insult a great many people, some of whom will choose to injure you in return. No one will see your honest statement as completely objective and free of some personal motivation. And they will be right: in truth the use of honesty is indeed a power strategy, intended to convince people of one’s noble, good hearted, selfless character. It is a form of persuasion, even a subtle form of coercion. pXVIII

The most important of these skills, and power’s crucial foundation is the ability to master your emotions. An emotional response to a situation is a mistake that will cost you a lot than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings. Emotions cloud reason, and if you can’t see the situation clearly, you can’t prepare for and respond to it with any degree of control. pXIX

You can’t repress anger or love, or avoid feeling them, and you shouldn’t try. But you should be careful about how you express them, and most important, they should never influence your plans and strategies in any way. pXX

1^st LAW: NEVER OUTSHINE THE MASTER

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, don’t go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain heights of power. P1

If you are more intelligent than your master seem the opposite: Make him appear more intelligent than you. Act naïve. Make it seem that you need his expertise. Commit harmless mistakes that will not hurt you in the long run but will give you the chance to ask for his help… A master who can’t bestow on you the gifts of his experience may direct rancor and ill will at you instead. P6

2^nd LAW: NEVER PUT TOO MUCH TRUST IN FRIENDS; LEARN HOW TO USE ENEMIES

Be wary of friends – they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also became spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them. P8

3^rd LAW: CONCEAL YOUR INTENTIONS

Keep people off balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they can’t prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late. P16

Most people are open books. They say what they feel, blurt out their opinions at every opportunity, and constantly reveal their plans. They do this for several reasons. First, it is easy and natural to always talk about one’s feelings and intentions for the future. Second, many believe that by being honest and open they are winning people’s hearts. They are decidedly wrong. Honesty is likely to offend people; it’s much more prudent to tailor your words, telling people what they want to hear rather than the coarse and ugly truth of what you feel and think. P20

One of the most effective smoke screens is the noble gesture. People want to believe apparently noble gestures are genuine, for the belief is pleasant. They rarely notice how deceptive these gestures can be. P28

4^th LAW: ALWAYS SAY LESS THAN NECESSARY

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish. P31

5^th LAW: SO MUCH DEPENDS ON REPUTATION- GUARD IT WITH YOUR LIFE

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them. P37

In the social realm, appearances are the barometer of almost all of our judgments, and you must never be misled into believing otherwise. P40

6^th LAW: COURT ATTENTION AT ALL COST

Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd or buried into oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous at all costs. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses. P44

Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you. P52

7^th LAW: GET OTHERS DO THE WORK FOR YOU, BUT ALWAYS TAKE THE CREDIT

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed. In the end, your helpers will be forgotten, and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you. P56

8^th LAW: MAKE OTHER PEOPLE COME TO YOU – USE BAIT IF NECESSARY

When you force the other person to act, you are the one in control. It is always better to make your opponent come to you, abandoning his own plans in the process. Lure him with fabulous gains- then attack. You hold the cards. P62

9^th LAW: WIN THROUGH YOUR ACTIONS, NEVER THROUGH ARGUMENT

Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really Pyrrhic victory: the resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate. P69

10^th LAW: AVOID THE UNHAPPY AND UNLUCKY

You can die from someone else’s misery – emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead. P76

If you are miserly by nature, you will never go beyond a certain limit; only generous souls attain greatness. Associate with the generous, and they will infect you, opening up everything that is tight and restricted in you. If you are gloomy, gravitate to the cheerful. If you are prone to isolation, force yourself to befriend the gregarious. Never associate with those who share your deficits – they will reinforce everything that holds you back. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world. P81

11^th LAW: LEARN TO KEEP PEOPLE DEPENDENT ON YOU

To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted. The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have. Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear. Never teach them enough so that they can do without you. P82

12^th LAW: USE SELECTIVE HONESTY AND GENEROSITY TO DISARM YOUR VICTIM

One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. At timely gift – a Trajan horse – will serve the same purpose. P89

13^th LAW: WHEN ASKING FOR HELP, APPEAL TO PEOPLE’S SELF INTEREST – NEVER TO THEIR MERCY OR GRATITUDE

If you need to turn to an ally for help, don’t bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. He will find a way to ignore you. Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself. P95

14^th LAW: POSE A FRIEND, WORK AS A SPY

Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying. P101

15^th LAW: CRUSH YOUR ENEMY TOTALLY

All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely. If one ember is left alight, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation.: the enemy will never recove, and will seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit. P107

16^th LAW: USE ABSENCE TO INCREASE RESPECT AND HONOR

Too much circulation makes the price go down: the more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Create value through scarcity. P115

Love never dies of starvation, but often of indigestion – Ninon De Lenclos p119

Once you die, everything about you will seem different. You will be surrounded by an instant aura of respect. People will remember their criticisms of you, their arguments with you, and be filled with regret and guilt… But you don’t have to wait until you die: by completely withdrawing for a while, you create a kind of death before death. And when you come back, it will be as if you had come back from the dead – an air of resurrection will cling to you. P120

17^th LAW: KEEP OTHERS IN SUSPENDED TERROR: CULTIVATE AN AIR OF UNPREDICTABILITY

Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off balance and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize. P123

18^th LAW: DON’T BUILD FORTRESSES; ISOLATION IS DANGEROUS

The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere – everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from – it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd. P130

19^th LAW: KNOW WHO YOU’RE DEALING WITH – DON’T OFFEND THE WRONG PERSON

There are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way. Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge. They are wolves in lamb’s clothing. Choose your victims and opponents carefully then – never offend or deceive the wrong person. P137

The types of person to avoid:

The arrogant and proud man – Any perceived slight will lead to a vengeance of overwhelming violence… There is no sanity behind this overreaction, so don’t waste any time trying to figure him out. Flee. Whatever you are hoping for from this person isn’t worth it.

Hopelessly Insecure man – If his pride is wounded, he will attack you in bites that will take forever to get big enough for you to notice. Disappear for a long time or he will nibble you to death.

Mr. Suspicion- He sees what he wants to see in you – usually the worst – and imagines everyone is after him. He is the least dangerous of the 3 because he is genuinely unbalanced and easy to deceive. Play on his suspicious nature to get him to turn against your enemies, just don’t become the target – or watch out.

Serpent with the long memory – If hurt, he will show no anger, but will calculate and wait. Then when in a position of strength, he will exact a revenge marked by a coldblooded shrewdness. Recognize him by his cold calculation, cunning, and lack of affection in different areas of his life.

The unintelligent man – He is harder to deceive than you imagine because falling for a ruse often takes intelligence and imagination – a sense for the possible rewards. The danger becomes not that he will harm you, but rather that he’ll waste your time. Have a test ready – a joke, a story. If his reaction is utterly literal, continue at your own risk. P139

To see if you are dealing with an insecure person who can’t tolerate the slightest offense make a mild joke at their expense. A confident person will laugh; an overly insecure one will react as personally insulted. P141

20^th LAW: DON’T COMMIT TO ANYONE

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Don’t commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others – playing people against one another, making them pursue you. P145

When Henry Kissinger, as US secretary of state, wanted to reach détente with the Soviets, he made no concession or conciliatory gestures, but courted China instead. This infuriated and scared the Soviets. But this move pushed them to the negotiating table. This tactic has a parallel in seduction: court the sister first and stay aloof initially to the woman you really want. P149

Hold back from the fray between 2 parties, giving yourself time to position yourself and take advantage of the situation once one side starts to lose. You can take the game a step further by promising both sides your support while maneuvering that the one to come ahead is you. This is what Castruccio Castracani, a small rule in 14^th century Italy did when he had designs on the town of Pistoia. A siege would have been expensive in money and lives, but he knew the town had 2 rival factions – the blacks and whites – which hated each other. He promised each side, secretly, that he would come to their aid against the other. And keeping his promise, he sent an army to the black controlled gate, and another army to the white controlled gate. The armies proceeded to enter the city, and unite in the middle, whereupon the occupied the city, killed the leaders of both factions, ended the internal war, and took the town. P153

21^st LAW: SEEM DUMBER THAN YOUR MARK

No one likes feeling stupider than the next person. The trick then is to make your victims feel smart – and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you have ulterior motives. P156

To reveal the true nature of your intellect rarely pays; you should get in the habit of downplaying it at all times. If people inadvertently learn the truth – they will admire you for being discreet than for making your brilliance show. At the start of your climb you can’t play too stupid: you must let your bosses know in a subtle way that you are smarter than your competition. As you climb the ladder up, you should dampen your brilliance. P161

There is one situation where it pays to do the opposite – when you can cover up a deception with a show of intelligence. If you have the authority and knowledge, people will believe what you have to say. P161

22^nd LAW: USE SURRENDER TO TRANSFORM WEAKNESS INTO POWER

When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment, and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane. Don’t give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you – surrender first. By turning the other cheek you infuriate and unsettle him. Make surrender a tool of power. P163

23^rd LAW: CONCENTRATE YOUR FORCES

Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point. You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper than by flitting form one shallow mine to another – intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come. P171

24^th LAW: PLAY THE PERFECT COURTIER

The perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court. P178

In 19^th century Arab Darfur courtier had to do whatever the sultan did: if he were injured, they had to suffer the same injury; if he fell off of his horse during a hunt, they fell too. P179

The Laws of Court Politics

Avoid Ostentation

Modesty is preferable; trumpeting your achievements will stir up enough envy among your peers to induce treachery and backstabbing.

Practice Nonchalance

Even when something demands a lot of sweat, make it look effortless; letting them see your blood and toil is another form of ostentation.

Be Frugal with Flattery

Flatter indirectly, otherwise too much flattery will lose its value and stir up suspicion among your peers.

Arrange to be Noticed

Pay attention to your physical appearance, and find a way to create a distinctive – subtly distinctive – style and image.

Alter your style and language according to who you are dealing with

Equality – the idea of talking and acting the same with everyone – is a terrible mistake. Those below you will take it as a form of condescension, and those above will be offended.

Never be the bearer of bad news

Bring only good news and your approach will gladden your master

Never affect intimacy and deep friendship with your master

He doesn’t want a friend, he wants a subordinate. If he wants a friendship, make the distance between you clear.

Never directly criticize those above you

When some of sort criticism is necessary – and to say nothing or give no advice would open risks of another sort – you must learn to couch your advice and criticism indirectly and politely.

Ask superiors for few favors

Nothing irritates a master more than having to reject someone’s request. So ask for favors rarely. And never ask on another person’s behalf, least of all friends.

Never joke about appearance of taste of those above you

Don’t even try it when they are not present, as these are 2 highly sensitive areas.

Don’t be the court Cynic

Express modest admiration rather than constant criticism. This will invite others to reciprocate.

Be Self Observant

You need a mirror for your actions, this can be trusted colleague, but you must become the mirror eventually.

Master your Emotions

You must learn to cry and laugh on command when its appropriate. You must be able to disguise your anger and frustration, and fake your contentment and agreement.

Fit the fashion of the times

Your spirit and way of thinking must keep up with the times, even if it offends your sensibilities. Be too forward thinking, and no one will understand you. Wear fashions from 10 years ago, and you’ll be the court the jester.

Be a source of Pleasure

Not everyone can play the role of favorite, for not everyone is blessed with charm and wit. But we can all control our unpleasant qualities and obscure them when necessary. P182

25^th LAW: RECREATE YOURSELF

Don’t accept the roles that society foists on you. Recreate yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention, and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life. P191

26^th LAW: KEEP YOUR HANDS CLEAN

You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency: your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds. Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cat’s paws to disguise your involvement. P200

27^th LAW: CREATE A CULTLIKE FOLLOWING

People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power. P215

How to create a cult in 5 easy steps:

Keep it vague; keep it simple

Most people’s problems have complex causes: deep rooted neurosis, interconnected social factors, roots that go back in time and are exceedingly hard to unravel. Few, however, have the patience to deal with this; most people want to hear that a simple solution will cure their problems. The ability to offer this kind of solution will give you great power and build you a following.

Emphasize the visual and the sensual over the intellectual

Once people have begun to gather around you, 2 dangers will present themselves; boredom and skepticism… You need to amuse the bored, and ward off the cynics. The best way to do this is through theater… Appeal to all the senses; use incense, soothing music, colorful charts and graphs, gadgets to tickle the mind – as long as you don’t’ make anyone really think. Use the exotic – distant cultures, strange customs to make the banal appear extraordinary.

Borrow the forms of organized religion and structure

Create rituals and organize them into a hierarchy, ranking them in grades of sanctity and giving them names and titles that resound with religious overtones; them for sacrifices that will fill your coffers and increase your power.

Disguise your source of income

Surround yourself with luxury so you become living proof of the soundness of your belief system to others, but never reveal that your wealth comes from your follower’s pockets; instead make it seem that it comes from the truth of your methods. Followers will copy your each and every move in the belief that it will bring them the same results, and this will blind them to the true nature of your wealth.

Setup and Us vs. Them dynamic

Make sure your followers believe that they are part of an exclusive club, unified by a bond of common goals. Manufacture a devious enemy out to ruin you. Any nonbelievers who try to reveal your charlatan nature can now be described as a member of this devious force. P219

Our tendency to doubt is broken down when we join a group. The warmth and infectiousness of the group overwhelm the skeptical individual. This is the power you gain by creating a cult… Play on people’s repressed sexuality, you lead them to mistake their excited feelings for signs of your mystical strength. You gain untold power by working on people’s unrealized desire for a kind of promiscuous and pagan unity… Take the latest technological trend or fad and blend it with a noble cause – faith, healing – and people will attribute powers to you that you never even thought to claim. P225

28^th LAW: ENTER ACTION WITH BOLDNESS

If you are unsure of a course of action, don’t attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid. P227

Boldness and Hesitation: a brief psychological comparison:

The bolder the lie, the better.

When putting together a con or entering any kind of negotiation, go further than you planned. Ask for the moon and you will be surprised how often you get it.

Lions circle hesitant prey

If you compromise, back down, and retreat, you bring out the lion even in people who are not bloodthirsty. Once you are seen as a person who quickly goes on the defensive, you will be pushed around without mercy.

Boldness strikes fear; Fear creates authority

By intimidating with a bold move, you establish a precedent: in every subsequent encounter, people will be on the defensive, in terror of your next strike.

Going halfway digs a deeper grave

Entering an action without total confidence sets up obstacles. When a problem arises you will grow confused, seeing options where there are none, and inadvertently creating more problems.

Hesitation creates gaps; Boldness obliterates them

When you take time to think, hem and haw you create a gap that allows others time to think as well. Boldness destroys such gaps; swiftness leaves no time to doubt and worry. In seduction, hesitation is fatal – it makes your victim conscious of your intentions. The bold move crowns seduction with triumph. It leaves no time for reflection.

Audacity separates you from herd

We can’t keep our eyes off the audacious – we can’t wait to see their next bold move. P228

Casanova’s boldness was not revealed in a daring approach, or in intrepid words of flattery, it consisted in his ability to surrender himself to her completely and to make her believe he would do anything for her, even risk his life, which he sometimes did. This was infinitely more flattering than compliments. At no point during the seduction did he show hesitation or doubt, simply because he never felt it. P233

29^th LAW: PLAN ALL THE WAY TO THE END

The ending is everything. Plan all the way to it, taking into account all the possible consequences, obstacles, and twists of fortune that might reverse your hard work and give glory to others. By planning to the end you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead. P236

Because most people are too imprisoned in the moment to plan, the ability to ignore immediate dangers and pleasures translates into power… Most people believe that they are in fact aware of the future, that they are planning and thinking ahead. They are usually deluded: what they are really doing is succumbing to their desires, to what they want the future to be. Their plans are vague, based upon their imagination not reality. They are really focusing on the happy ending, and deluding themselves by the strength of their desire. P241

The most ordinary cause of people’s mistakes is their being too much frightened at the present danger, and not enough so at that which is remote. – Cardinal de Retz

30^th LAW: MAKE YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS SEEM EFFORTLESS

Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed. When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more. Avoid temptation of revealing how hard you work – it only raises questions. Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you. P245

Early on in Houdini’s career, an old Japanese performer taught him an ancient trick: how to swallow an ivory ball, then bring it back up. He practices this endlessly with a small peeled potato tied to a string – up and down he would manipulate the potato with his throat muscles, until they were strong enough to move it without the string. His body could be searched thoroughly before his tricks, but no one could check inside his throat for small tools to help him escape. P249

Never expose the sweat and labor behind your poise. Some think that such exposure will demonstrate their diligence and honesty, but it actually just makes them look weaker – as if anyone who practiced and worked could do what they had done. P250

When seeing performers who put too much effort into their act breaks the illusion, making us uncomfortable. Calm, graceful performers set us at ease, creating the illusion that they are being natural, even when everything they are doing involves labor and practice. P251

Finally, because you achieve your accomplishments with grace and ease, people believe that you could always do more if you tried harder. P252

31^st LAW: CONTROL THE OPTIONS

The bees deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice: your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets. Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose. Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose. Put them on the horns of a dilemma: they are gored wherever they turn. P254

Withdrawal and disappearance are classic ways of controlling options. You give people a sense of how things will fall apart without you, and you offer them a choice: I stay away and you suffer the consequences or I return under circumstances that I dictate. P256

A good technique to use on children and other willful people who enjoy doing the opposite of what you ask: push them to ‘choose’ what you want them to do by appearing to advocate the opposite. P259

Common forms of controlling the options:

Color the choices, present multiple options, but color your favored option the best.

Force the resister, force them to conduct themselves as if the source of their resistance has come true. Now they’ll have to resist that!

Alter the playing field, to force them to only have the options that you want

Shrink their options, use their hesitation against them by removing options as time goes by.

Weak man on the precipice, exaggerate the dangers to strike fear and emotion to get them to make a decision.

Brothers in crime. Get them to commit a crime (or think that they have). Its often wise to implicate in your deceptions the very person who can do you the most harm if you fail. Their involvement can be subtle – even a hint of their involvement will narrow their options and buy their silence.

32^nd LAW: PLAY TO PEOPLE’S FANTASIES

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh, and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses. P263

Reality vs Fantasy:

Reality: Self change is slow and gradual, requiring hard work, a bit of luck, self sacrifice, and a lot of patience.

Fantasy: a sudden transformation will bring change in one’s fortunes, bypassing work, luck, self sacrifice, and time in one fantastic stroke.

Reality: the social realm has hard set codes and boundaries. We understand their limits and know that we have to move within the same familiar circles, day in and day out.

Fantasy: We can enter a new world with different codes, and the promise of adventure.

Reality: Society is fragmented and full of conflict

Fantasy: People can come together in a mystical union of souls

Reality: Death

Fantasy: A sudden reversal of this intolerable fact allows the dead to be brought back and the past to be changed. P268

33^rd LAW: DISCOVER EACH MANS THUMBSCREW

Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usually an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage. P271

Finding the Thumbscrew:

Pay attention to gestures and unoonscious signals. Start by always seeming interested – a sympathetic ear will always spurn anyone to talk… Train your eyes for details – how someone tips a waiter, what delights a person, hidden messages in clothes. Find people’s idols, the things they worship and will do anything to get – perhaps you can be the supplier of their fantasies. Since we all try to hide our weaknesses, there is little to be learned from our conscious behavior. What oozes out in the little things outside our conscious behavior is what you want to know.

Find the Helpless Child. One sign of this weakness is that when you touch on it the person will often act like a child. If your victim reveals that they went without parental support, supply it. If they reveal a secret taste, a hidden indulgence, indulge it.

Look for Contrasts. People who thump their chest are often cowards; a prudish exterior may hide a lascivious soul; the uptight are often screaming for adventure; the shy are dying for attention.

Find the Weak Link. Find the one person who has the greatest influence in a group win their favor and you influence the king, or find who is the weakest in a united team, he will bend to pressure.

Fill the Void. The 2 emotional voids to fill are insecurity and unhappiness. The insecure crave social validation. Find the roots of the unhappiness. These people are the least able to hide their weaknesses.

Feed on Uncontrollable Emotions. People in the grip of fear, lust, greed, vanity, hatred, etc. can’t control themselves, and you can do the controlling for them. P273

34^th LAW: ACT LIKE A KING TO BE TREATED LIKE ONE

The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated: in the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown. P282

As children we expect and demand everything from the world. This generally carries over into our first forays into society, as we begin our careers. But as we grow older the rebuffs and failures we experience set up boundaries that only get firmer with time. Coming to expect less from the world, we accept limitations that are really self imposed. The solution to such a shrinking of horizons is to deliberately force ourselves in the opposite direction – to downplay and ignore limitations, to make ourselves demand and expect as much as a child… We must believe that we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward and infect people around us, who will think that we must reasons to feel so confident. P287

Dignity is the mask to assume under difficult circumstances: it is as if nothing can affect you, and you have all the time in the world to respond. This is an extremely powerful pose. P288

35^th LAW: MASTER THE ART OF TIMING

Never seem to hurry – hurrying betrays a lack of control over yourself, and over time. Always seem patient, as if you know that everything will come to you eventually. Become a detective of the right moment; sniff out the spirit of the times, the trends that will carry you to power. Learn to stand back when the time is not ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition. P291

36^th LAW: DISDAIN THE THINGS YOU CAN’T HAVE

By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but can’t have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem. P300

37^th LAW: CREATE COMPELLING SPECTACLES

Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power – everyone responds to them. Stage spectacles for those around you, then, full of arresting visual and radiant symbols that heighten your presence. Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing. P309

Establish a trademark to set yourself apart. Then take the game further; find an image or symbol from the past that will fit your situation, and put it on your shoulders like a cape. It will make you seem larger than life. P313

38^th LAW: THINKS AS YOU LIKE, BUT BEHAVE LIKE OTHERS

If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think you only want attention and that you look down upon them. They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality with your closest friends and only those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness. P317

Many of us feel the siren call of the exotic, the foreign. Measure and moderate this desire. Flaunting your pleasure in alien ways of thinking and acting will reveal a different motive – to demonstrate your superiority over others. P319

The reason that arguments don’t work is that most people hold their ideas and values without thinking about them. There is strong emotional content in their beliefs: they really don’t want to have to rework their habits of thinking, and when you challenge them, whether directly through your arguments or indirectly through your behaviors, they are hostile. P322

39^th LAW: STIR UP WATERS TO CATCH FISH

Anger and emotion are strategically counterproductive. You must always stay calm and objective. But if you can make your enemies angry while staying calm yourself, you gain a decided advantage. Put your enemies off balance: find the chink in their vanity through which you can rattle and you hold the strings. P325

Anger at first may strike fear and terror, but only in some, but as the days pass and storm clears, other responses emerge – embarrassment and uneasiness about the shouter’s capacity for going out of control, and resentment of what has been said. Long your temper, you always make unfair and exaggerated accusations. A few such tirades and people are counting the days until you are gone. P327

You shouldn’t repress your anger or emotion. For repression drains us of energy and pushes us into strange behaviors. Instead we have to realize that nothing is the social realm is personal. Everyone is caught up in a chain of events that long predates the present. Our anger most often stems from our childhood, from problems with our parents, whose problems stem from their own childhood, on and on… This shift in perspective will let you play the game with clarity and energy. Instead of overreacting and becoming ensnared in other people’s emotions, you will turn their loss of control to your advantage. You will keep your head while they lose theirs. P330

Sun Pin, commander of Chi, faced the armies of Wei, which outnumbered his army 2 to 1. “Let us light 100,000 fires when our army enters Wei, then 50,000 the next day, and only 30,000 on the 3^rd day.’ On the 3^rd day, the Wei general exclaimed ‘The men of Chi are cowards, after only 3 days more than ½ have deserted!’ So leaving his slow heavy infantry, the general decided to seize the moment and move swiftly on the Chi camp with a light force. Sun Pin’s troops retreated, drawing Wei’s army into a narrow pass, where they ambushed and destroyed them. Sun Pin easily defeated the rest of the Wei army the next day. P330

40^th LAW: DESPISE THE FREE LUNCH

What is offered for free is dangerous – it usually involves either a trick or hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is often worth paying full price – there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money, and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and magnet for power. P333

The story soon spread of an Incan Indian chief from Peru who once a year would cover himself in gold dust and dive into a lake. Soon word of mouth transformed Golden Man or El Dorado in Spanish, into an empire called El Doraodo, where the streets were paved with gold. And why not? For surely if a chief could afford to waste gold dust in a lake, he must rule a golden empire. P335

Beware of the:

Greedy Fish: They take the human element out of money. Cold and ruthless, viewing others either as pawns or obstuctions in their pursuit of wealth. No one wants to work with them, and over the years they end up isolated… They are easy to deceive, for they spend so much time dealing with numbers that they become blind to psychology, including their own.

Bargain Demon: They worry endlessly about what they could have gotten elsewhere for a little less. The costs of their pursuits is time and worry, for bargains often are shabby, in need of repair, or have to be replaced often.

Sadist: They seem to think that paying for something gives them the right to torture and abuse the seller.

Indiscriminate Giver: Generosity attracts people, softens them up, makes allies out of them. Indiscriminate givers are generous because they want to be loved and admired by all. But if they give to one and all, why should the recipient feel special?

Baron Rothschild knew that money had created a barrier between him and others, making him look ugly and untrustworthy. The best way to overcome this was to literally waste huge sum, to show he didn’t value money. This is what the potlatch was to the Pacific Northwest Indians in an absurd display to show their power. The base of the power is not money, but the confidence that the tribe could easily restore all that the potlatch had destroyed. P340

41^st LAW: AVOID STEPPING INTO A GREAT MAN’S SHOES

What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. IF you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. Don’t get lost in their shadow or stuck in a past not of your own making: establish your own name and identify by changing course. Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way. P347

The son will never step out of his father’s shadow unless he adopts the ruthless strategy of Alexander: disparage the past, create your own kingdom, put the father into the shadows instead letting him do the same to you. P353

When Gen Douglas MacArthur took over the Philippines during WW2, an assistant handed him a book of precedents established by the prior commanders. MacArthur asked how many copies were there. The assistant answered 6. MacArthur replied, ‘get those 6 copies together – and burn every one of them. I’ll not be bound by precedents. Any time a problem comes up, I’ll make the decision at once – immediately.” P354

When our power is secure, there is no need to act. Many who are successful when young, will self destroy themselves to rekindle the will to act. Tennesse Williams had to bring himself to have a nervous breakdown to resume his writing career after the success of Glass Menagerie brought him fame. In his own words, “I was not aware o how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. This was security at last. I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed.” Pushed to the edge, Williams could write with vitality again, and produced ‘Streetcar Named Desire”. .. Dostoyevsky would feel that the financial security he had gained made the act of creation unnecessary. He would take his entire savings to the casino and would not leave until he had gambled away his last penny. Once reduced to poverty he could write again. P355

42^nd LAW: STRIKE THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP WILL SCATTER

Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual – the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoner of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Don’t wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, don’t try to negotiate with them – they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter. P358

43^rd LAW: WORK ON THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF OTHERS

Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear, and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you. P367

When most people meet someone new, rather than stepping back and probing to see what makes this person unique, they talk about themselves, eager to impose their own willpower and prejudices. They argue, boast, and make a show of their power. They may not know it, but they are secretly creating an enemy, a resister, because there is no more infuriating feeling than having your individuality ignored. P372

Don’t believe that this approach works only on the illiterate and uneducated – it works on one and all. All of us are mortal and face the same dreadful fate, and all of us share the desire for attachment and belonging. Stir up these emotions and you captivate our hearts. P373

Play on contrasts: push people to despair and then give them relief. If they expect pain, give them pleasure. Creating pleasure of any kind will usually bring you success, as will allaying fears and providing security. P373

A great gesture of self sacrifice – to show that you suffer as those around you – will make people identify with you, even if your suffering is symbolic or minor and theirs is real. P373

44^th LAW: DISARM AND INFURIATE WITH THE MIRROR EFFECT

The mirror reflects reality, but it is also the perfect tool for deception: when you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they can’t figure out your strategy. The mirror mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact. By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions,you teach them a lesson. P376

If you can show you understand another person by reflecting their inmost feelings, they will be entranced and disarmed, all the more because it happens so rarely. P375

When Alcibiades, Athenian circa 400 BC, argued his ideas strongly with other people he would win over a few hearts while at the same time alienating many more. The secret to gaining ascendancy over large numbers he came to believe was not to impose his colors but to absorb the colors those around him, like a chameleon. Once people fell under his spell, he could practice his deceptions invisibly. P382

45^th LAW: PREACH THE NEED FOR CHANGE BUT NEVER REFORE TOO MUCH AT ONCE

Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day to day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement. P392

Emperor Aurelian,in 274AD established 12/25 as the birthday of the Sun god Mithras. This cult spread from Persia throughout the Roman empire, and was held especially by the Roman legions as a bringer of peace and fertility, and victory. So it was a clever move that in 354, the Pope coopted the birthday of Mithras and declared December 25 to be the birthday of Jesus Christ. P394

Emperor Wang Mang (AD 8-23), found some Confucian text still intact, after the first Emperor Chin in 200 BC had ordered all such texts destroyed. This gave Wang an opportunity. He first confiscated them, then had scribes insert passages into them that seemed to support the changes he had been imposing on the country. When he released the texts, it seemed that Confucius sanctioned Wang’s reforms. The fact that the past is dead and buried gives your freedom to reinterpret it. P397

“A new scientific truth doesn’t triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”.. So pay lip service to tradition. Identify the elements in your revolution that can be made to seem to build on the past. Say the right things, make a show of conformity, and meanwhile let your theories do the radical work. Play with appearances and respect protocol. This is true in every arean – science being no exception. P398

46^th LAW: NEVER APPEAR TOO PERFECT

Appearing better than others is dangerous, but most dangerous is to appear to have no faults. Envy creates silent enemies. It’s smart to occasionally display defects and admit to harmless vices in order to deflect envy and appear more human.

Only a minority can succeed in the game of life, and that minority inevitably arouses the envy of those around them. Once success happens your way, however, the people to fear the most are those in your own circle, the friends and acquaintances you have left behind. Feelings of inferiority gnaw at them… Either dampen your success, purposely revealing a defect, weakness, or anxiety or attributing your success to luck; or simply find yourself new friends. P403

In dealing with envy, first accept the fact that there will be people who will surpass you, and that you may envy them. But make that feeling a way of pushing yourself to equal or surpass them. Let envy point inward and it poisons the soul; expel it outward and it can move you to greater heights. Second, that those below you will envious of you. Read between the lines of their criticisms, their little sarcastic remarks, the signs of backstabbing, the excessive praise that is preparing you for a fall, the resentful look in the eye. Finally expect the people who envy you to work against you insidiously. P406

It is often your own actions that stir up envy, your own unawareness. By becoming conscious of those actions that create envy, you can take the teeth out of it before it nibbles you to death. P406

Subtly emphasize how lucky you have been to make your happiness seem more attainable to others, but be careful not to affect a false modesty that can be easily seen through. This will only make them more envious. P407

Once envy is there out in the open it is best to affect the opposite approach. Instead of hiding your perfection, make it obvious. Make every new triumph an opportunity to make the envious squirm. Their open envy can have little effect on you, since it is known and to be expected, and you will have the best revenge; they are trapped in envy while you are free in your power. P409

47^th LAW: DON’T GO PAST MARK YOU AIMED FOR; LEARN WHEN TO STOP

The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. In the heat of victory, overconfidence and arrogance can push you past the initial goal, and in going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Don’t allow success to go to your head. Set a goal, and when you reach it. Stop.

48^th LAW: ASSUME FORMLESSNESS

By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack. Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable, and on the move. Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes. P419

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 06:15:00 +0000

This is a mainstream book that got some good press on the subject that talent is created, painstakingly and is not inborn. Unfortunately, this idea by Coyle was completely beaten to the punch by this book "Talent is Overrated", published 2 years earlier by Geoff Colvin:
http://bensbookblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/talent-is-overrated-by-geoff-colvin.html

Researchers found a directly proportional relationship between hours of practice and white matter (myelin) in skills varying from piano playing to reading skill to vocabulary skill. In 2005, a study of 47 normal children aged 5 to 18 correlated increased IQ with increased organization and density of white matter. P40

The more a nerve fires, the more myelin wraps around it. The more myelin wraps around it, the faster the signals travel, increasing velocities up to 100x... In addition, the refractory time (the wait required between one signal and the next) decreases by a factor of 30. The increased speed and decreased refractory time combine to boost overall information processing speed by 3000x. P41

This explains why you have no hope in hitting a fastball by 'thinking about' unless you've practiced it 1000s of time to create a 3000x faster circuit.

Myelination happens in one dirction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't uninsulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are so hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors – by myelinating new circuits. P45

We continue to experience a net gain of myelin until age 50, when the balance tips towards loss. We retain the ability to myelinate throughout life – thankfully 5% of our oligos (myelin building cells) remain immature, always ready to answer the call. P45

Why do breast fed babies have higher IQ's?

Because the fatty acids in breast milk are the building blocks of myelin.

Why did Michael Jordan have to retire?

His muscles were fine and strong, but his myelin started to break down with age, not much, but enough to prevent him from firing impulses at the speed and frequency required for his explosive movement.

Why can horses walk immediately on being born, while humans take a year?

A horse is born with its muscles and nerves for walking already myelinated, ready to go. A babies don't get myelinated a year or so. P67-8

The unconscious mind is able to process over 11 million pieces of information per second, while the conscious mind can manage only 40. This disproportion points to the efficiency and necessity of relegating mental activities to the unconscious – and helps us to understand why appeals to the unconscious can be so effective. P112

See the Lords of Dogtown as an example of a Hotbed and good Coaching.

In Finland, a teacher is regarded as the social equal of a doctor or lawyer, and is compensated accordingly. All elementary school teachers have master's degrees; schools are run like teaching hospitals, where young teachers are analyzed and evaluated. It's competitive: some schools receive 40 applications for 1 position... Finns spend less per pupil than Americans - $7500/year vs. $8700/year. Yet by 9^th grade, Finnish students outscore the rest of the world in math, science and reading, and help to keep the Finns amongst world's most productive workers. P208

The Rational Optimist *** by Matt Ridley

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:43:00 +0000

This book has a very interesting and thought provoking hypothesis: that humans transformed themselves culturally and developmentally because of our ability to exchange and trade. Exchange has been a driving force behind our cultural evolution, and has led us from simple tools to specialization, agriculture, cities, technology, the internet and beyond. Coupling this with Jared Diamond's geographical hypothesis on human development over the past 50,000 years, a very interesting way to view our species' history.

It is my contention that looking inside our heads, we would be looking in the wrong place to explain this extraordinary capacity for change in the species.. It was not something that happened within the brain. It was something that happened between brains... At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal. P4

At some point before 100,000 years ago culture itself began to evolve in a way it never did in any other species – that is to replicate, mutate, compete, select, and accumulate – somewhat as genes had been doing for billions of years. P5

Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution. By exchanging, humans discovered the division of labor, the specialisation of efforts and talent for mutual gain... Specialisation encouraged innovation because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply the saving of time. The more humans diversified as consumers and producers, and the more they exchanged, the better off they have been, are, and will be. P7

Getting richer is not the only way or even the best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective; the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality, and so on. P28

The most striking example of technological regress is Tasmania. A population of less than 5000 hunter gatherers divided into 9 tribes after reaching this island over 35,000 years ago. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit purely because they lacked the numbers to sustain their existing technology... They had no bone tools, no cold weather clothing, no barbed spears, no fish traps, no spear throwers, no boomerangs... Most of these had been made and used by the very first Tasmanians. The first Tasmanians caught and ate plenty of fish, but by the time Westerners first contacted them, they not only ate no fish, but had not eaten any in over 3000 years. P78

Perhaps the first steps to trade with strangers began as individual friendships. A woman could trust her daughter who married into an allied band within the same tribal grouping. Then perhaps the woman's husband could learn to trust his son-in-law... Step by step, the habit of trade began to grow alongside the habit of xenophobia, complicating the ambitions of men and women. P91

Oxytocin is common to all mammals... so the chances are that is available to underpin trust is almost any social mammal... It is highly likely that during the past 100,000 years humans developed pecularily sensitive oxytocin systems, much more ready to fire with sympathy, as a result of natural selection in a trading species. P97

Humans began tentatively to trade, capturing benefits of comparative advantage and collective brains, which in turn encouraged evolution to favor mutants with a mind capable of trust, empathy, and even to do so cautiously and suspiciously. P98

The lesson of the last two centuries is that liberty and welfare march hand in hand with prosperity and trade. Countries that lose their liberty to tyrants today (through military coups typically), generally experience a per capita income loss of 1.4%. p109

Walmart causes a 13% drop in its competitor's prices and saves its customers nationally $200B/year. P113

Firms are temporary aggregations of people to help them do their producing in such a way as to help others do their consuming. P115

Americans can draw upon 10x as much more intangible capital as Mexicans, which explains why a Mexican who crosses the border can quadruple his productivity almost immediately. P117

Agriculture was possible because of trade. Trade provided the incentive to specialize in farmed goods and to generate surplus food. Agriculture started to appear independently in the Near East, Andes, Mexico, China, New Guinea, Brazil, Africa – all within a few thousand years. Something made it inevitable, almost compulsory around this time. P124

In search of extra calories people started to move down the food chain... 23,000 years ago there is evidence of milling barley seeds and stone ovens for baking. So bread is far older than farming, and people captured the benefits of cereals -milled and baked starch – long before they took on the hard graft of farming them. Why spend months tending your own field of corn, when you can spend a few hours harvesting a wild one? P124

The wastefulness of irrigation is a product of the low price of water. Once it is properly priced, water is not only used more frugally, but its very abundance increases through incentives to capture and store it. P148

The sudden emergence of an all conquering prophet in the middle of a desert in the 7^th century is rather baffling as the tale is usually told – one of religious inspiration and military leadership. What is missing are the economic reasons that the Arabs were suddenly in a position to carry all before them. Thanks to a newly perfected technology, the camel. Camel caravans were the source the wealth that carried Muhammad and his followers to power. It wasn't until the early middle ages that the camel was made into reliable beast of burden which could carry far than a donkey, and go places a wheeled cart could not – and it could find its own forage en route reducing fuel costs to essentially zero – like a sailing ship. With the route down the Euphrates disrupted by Byzantine and Persian conflicts, the way was open for the people of Mecca to become rich through trade. P177

The Roman empires chief source of wattage (energy) was human muscle power from slaves. The period that followed the fall of Rome, especially in Europe, saw the widespread replacement of that muscle power with animals. The invention of dry grass hay enabled northern Europeans to feed oxen through the winter. Slaves were replaced by beasts, more out of practicality than compassion. Oxen, and horses eat simpler food, complain less, and are stronger than slaves. In turn, oxen and horses were soon replaced by water and wind mills. By 1300, there were 68 mills on a single mile of the Seine in Paris, and others floating on barges. Wind mills spread in areas where water power was not an option. Soon, the Dutch discovered they could burn peat (drained of course from the wind mills) to fuel the brick, ceramic, beer, soap, salt and sugar industries. Hay, water, and wind are simply ways of drawing on the sun's power. Timber is a way drawing on store of the sun's energy laid down in previous decades. Peat is an older store, laid down over millennia. Coal, which enabled the British to move forward with the industrial revolution, is solar energy laid down over 300M years ago... Gradually, erratically, more and more of the goods people made were made with fossil energy – not slaves. p216 Fossil fuels eliminated slavery.

Once fossil fuels joined in, economic growth truly took off, and became almost infinitely capable of bursting through the Malthusian ceiling and raising living standards... This leads to a shocking irony. I am about to argue that economic growth became sustainable (ever growing) when it began to rely on non-renewable, non-clean, non-green power. Every economic boom in history had ended in bust because renewable sources eventually could not meet the economic growth of a swelling populace. Coal didn't run out, no matter how much was used (this is still true!). And it actually became cheaper and more abundant over time (still true too!), in marked contrast to all renewable sources which became more expensive over time because of scarcity. P216

By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850M laborers. The capacity of the countries steam engines alone was the equivalent of six million horses or 40M men, who would have otherwise eaten 3 times the country's entire wheat crop. P231

Today the avg person on the planet consumes 2500 watts (or 600 calories/second), and 85% of the power comes from fossil fuels (mostly coal), the remaining 15% come from nuclear, and hydro. Since a reasonably fit person on an exercise bike can generate 50 watts, this means it would take 150 slaves, working 8 hour shifts each, to peddle you to your current lifestyle (American would need 660 slaves actually since we use much more power. The French only 360, and Nigerians only 16). The next you lament our dependence on fossil fuels, pause to imagine that for every family member, there should be over 600 unpaid slaves toiling in abject poverty to maintain your lifestyle. You can take this reductio ad absurdum two ways. You can regret the sinful profligacy of the modern world, which is the conventional wisdom, or you can conclude that were it not for fossil fuels, 99% of the people would have to live in slavery for the remaining 1% to have a decent standard of living, as indeed they did in the Bronze Age. P236

To supply the 300M inhabitants of the US with their 10,000 watts each (2400 calories per second) using non-fossils sources would require:

Solar panels the size of Spain
Wind farms the size of Kazakhstan
Woodland the size of India and Pakistan, cut down annually
Hayfields for horses the size of Russia and Canada combined, harvested annually
Dams with catchments (reservoirs) 1/3 larger than all of the world's continents put together!

As it is, a clutch of coal and nuclear power stations and handful of oil refineries and gas pipelines supply the 300M Americans with nearly all of their energy from an almost laughably small footprint – even taking into account the land despoiled by strip mines. P239

Property rights explains an astonishing 75% of economic growth... This explains why Botswana [in Africa] is no outlier. It flourished because its people owned property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves to a much greater extent than in the rest of the Africa... So give the rest of Africa good property rights and sit back and wait for enterprise to work its magic? If only it were that easy. Good institutions can't usually be imposed from above; they must evolve from the bottom up. P321

On a typical day in a southern Indian village, 11 fisherman landed good catches, but the local market was sated and the price of perishable sardines was zero. Just 10 miles away in either direction that same morning, there were 27 willing buyers who were leaving the markets empty handed because they could find no sardines, even at the inflated price of 10 rupees per kg. Had the fisherman known they could have pocketed an average of 3400 rupees each after fuel costs. By simply giving the fisherman mobile phones, they could call ahead to find out where the best place to land their catch. The result was that profits rose 8%, and prices to consumers fell 4%, and wastage fell from 5% to nearly 0%. Everybody gained. P327

Once solar panels can be mass produced at $200 per square meter with an efficiency of 12%, they could generate the equivalent of a barrel of oil for about $30... Arizona gets about 6 kilowatt hours of sunlight per square meter per day so it would take only 1/3 of the state to supply American with all of their energy. P345

Nuclear plants already produce more power from a smaller footprint, with fewer fatal accident and less pollution than any other energy technology. The waste they produce is not an insoluble problem (1 coke can per person per lifetime), easily stored and unlike every other toxin gets safer with time – its radioactivity falls to one billionth in 200 years. P345

Switch by Chip Heath

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 01:25:00 +0000

Need to change something or someone - including yourself? Some very good advice and approaches to make those changes easier to swallow and more likely to stick.

Too much of a bad thing

Moviegoers were given an inexhaustible supply of stale popcorn in either a large or medium bucket. People with the large buckets ate 53% more popcorn than people with the medium size. That was 173 more calories or 21 extra hand dips... These people weren't eating for pleasure, the popcorn was so stale it squeaked! It didn't matter whether they were hungry or full. The equation was unyielding: bigger container=more eating. Best of all, people refused to believe the results. The majority scoffed at the idea of their eating more because of the larger container size, saying “things like that don't trick me” or “I'm pretty good at knowing when I'm full.” p3

Cookie powered will power

Half the participants were asked to eat 2 or 3 cookies and some chocolate candies, but no radishes. The other half were asked to eat at least 2 or 3 radishes, but no cookies. While they ate, the researchers left the room, wanting the subjects to sit there alone glancing enviously at the fresh baked cookies. Despite the temptation all participants ate what they were asked to eat, and none of the radish eaters snuck a cookie. At that point, the 'taste study' was over, and a supposedly unrelated study on problem solving was conducted... The untempted students who were allowed to eat the treats spent 19 minutes on the task, making 34 well intentioned attempts to solve the problem. The radish eaters were less persistent. They gave up after only 8 minutes and the managed only 19 solution attempts. Why did they quit so easily? The answer may surprise you: they ran out of self control. Psychologists have discovered that self control is an exhaustible resource... The radish eaters had drained their self control by resisting the cookies. So when their elephants, inevitably, started complaining about the puzzle task – its too hard, it's no fun, we're no good at this – their riders didn't have enough strength to yank on the reins for more than 8 minutes. Meanwhile the cookie eaters had a fresh, untaxed rider, who fought off the elephant for 19 minutes. P10

Bigger change is harder to sustain. No duh.

Research shows that we burn up self control in a wide variety of situations: managing the impression we're making on others, coping with fears, controlling our spending, trying to focus on simple instructions. Here's why this matters for change: when people try to change things, they're usually tinkering with behaviors that have become automatic, and changing those behaviors requires careful supervision. The bigger the change, the more it will sap people's self-control. P11

When you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that's just flat wrong. Change is hard because people wear themselves out. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. P12

Find and leverage bright spots

In tough times, the rider sees problems everywhere, and analysis paralysis often kicks in. The rider will spin his wheels indefinitely unless he's given clear direction. That's why to make progress on a change, you need ways to direct the rider. Show him where to go, how to act, what destination to pursue. And that's why bright spots are so essential. [Brights spots are examples of what is working already that can be leveraged for a greater solution.] p33

Follow the bright spots... As you analyze your situation, you're sure to find some things that are working better than others. Don't obsess about the failures. Instead, investigate and clone the successes. Next give direction to the rider – both a start and a finish. Send him a destination postcard and script his critical moves. P98

None of us are objective - about ourselves

We're all lousy self-evaluators... Savor for a moment, the preposterousness of these findings... Only 2% of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25% of people believe they're in the top 1% in their ability to get along with others. 94% of college professors report doing above average work. People think they're at lower risk for cancer, heart disease, and food related illness than their peers. Most deliciously self deceptive of all, people say they're more likely than their peers to provide accurate self assessments! P114

One small step for change

People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one. That's why the conventional wisdom in development circles is that you don't publicly announce a fund raising campaign until you've already got 50% in the bag. After all who wants to give the first $100 to a $1M campaign? P127

Keeping up appearances

We essentially ask ourselves 3 things when we have decision to make: Who am I, What kind situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Notice what's missing: any calculation of costs and benefits. The identify model explains the way most people vote, which contradicts our notion of the 'self-interested voter'. It helps shed light on the Silicon Valley millionaire who votes democratic and the Oklahoma mechanic who votes republican. P153

Read the 4 following sentences:

You are a certain kind of person, and there's not much that can be done to really change that
No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially
You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can't really be changed
You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

If you agreed with items 1 & 3, you have a fixed mindset. And if you agreed with 2 & 4, you have a growth mindset. [See Carol Dweck's Mindset] p163

Direct the Rider

Follow the bright spots
Script the critical moves
Point to the destination

Motivate the Elephant

Find the feeling
Shrink the change
Grow your people

Shape the Path

Tweak the environment
Build Habits
Rally the herd

Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 00:18:00 +0000

The theory of everything is what this book is about. For hard core scientists, the book starts slow by reviewing alot of material that you would have studied in school before combining these ideas into the proposed 1o dimensional theory of everything 'M-Theory'.

The book does a great job of explaining Feynman's sum of histories concept, and how this impacts the way quantum systems behave - including our universe's origin.

I still don't get how Hawking radition causes black holes to evaporate to nothing (sadly the book doesn't really talk about that). Why doesn't the black hole just stay the same mass if an equal number of paired matter and anti-matter particles form at its event horizon and only one of the coupled pair falls in, leaving the other as a tell tale radiation? It would mean that an equal amount of matter and antimatter should fall in and radiate away; a net zero in change of mass of the black hole. Is there some preference for only antimatter to fall in and for matter to radiate away? It would seem for the black hole to radiate away this would have to be the case? Why should this be?

1000 years before Galileo and Coprenicus

Aristarchus (circa 310-230BC) used careful geometric analysis of the earth's shadow cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse to conclude that the sun must be much larger than the earth. Perhaps inspired by the idea that tiny objects ought to orbit mammoth ones, and not the other way around, he became the first person to argue that the earth is not the center of our planetary system, but rather that it and the other planets orbit the much larger sun. It is a small step from the realization that the earth is just another planet to the idea that our sun is nothing special either. Aristarchus suspected that this was case and believed that the stars we see in the night sky are actually nothing more than distant suns. P21

What a genius! Why don't we ever hear about poor Aristarchus? Robbed of his glory by Galileo, Corprenicus.

The illusion of free will

A study of patients undergoing brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion. P32

For example, we can't solve the equations governing the gravitational interactions of every atom in a person's body with every atom in the earth. But for all practical purposes the gravitational force between a person and the earth can be described in terms of just a few numbers, such as person's total mass. Similarily we can't solve the equations governing the behavior of complex atoms and molecules, but we have developed an effective theory called chemistry that provides an adequate explanation without accounting for every detail of the interactions. In the case of people, since we can't solve the equations that determine our behavior, we use the effective theory that people have free will. The study of our will, and of the behavior that arises from it, is the science of psychology. Economics is another effective theory, based on the notion of free will plus the assumption that people evaluate their possible alternative courses of action and choose the best. That effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. P33

A model is a good model if it:

Is elegant
Contains few arbitraty or adjustable elements
Agrees with and explains all existing observations
Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out p51

To paraphrase Einstein “A theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.”... Though added complexity could make the model more accurate, scientists view a model that is contorted to match a specific set of observations as unsatisfying, more of a catalog of data than a theory likely to embody any useful principle. P52

Feynmann was able to figure out why this happens

Firing electrons (or any other particle) at a double slit – one at a time – still produces an interference pattern. To physicists this was a startling revelation: If individual particles interfere with themselves, then the wave nature of light is the property not just of a beam or of a large collection of photons but of individual particles. P70

What happened before the big bang? Why not ask, what's south of the southpole?

Time can behave like another dimension... Suppose the beginning of the universe was like the south pole, with degrees of latitude playing the role of time. As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. The universe would start as a point at the south pole, but the south pole is much like any other point. To ask what happened before the beginning would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the south pole. In this picture, spacetime has no boundary – the same laws hold at the south pole as in other places. In an analgous manner, when one combines the general theory of relativity with quantum theory, the question of what what happened before the beginning of the universe is rendered meaningless. The idea that histories should be closed surfaces without boundary is called the no boundary condition. P135

Inflate or die

A few of the possible universes will be like bubbles of steam. Many tiny bubbles (universes) will appear, and then disapper again. These represent mini-universes that expand but collapse again while still microscopic size. They represent possible alternative universes, but they are not of much interest since they don't last long enough to develop galaxies and stars, let alone intelligent life. A few of the little bubbles, however, will grow large enough so that they will be safe from recollapse. They will continue to expand at an ever increasing rate. These correspond to universes that inflate. P138

How the present changes history, according to Feynmann

There will be a quantum probability amplitude for every number of large space dimensions from zero to 10. The Feynman sum [of histories] allows for all of these, for every possible history for the universe, but the observation that our universe has 3 large space dimensions selects out the subclass of histories that have the property that is being observed. In other words, the quantum probability that the universe has more than or less than 3 large dimensions is irrelevant because we have already determined that we are in a universe with 3 large dimensions. So as long as the probability amplitude for the 3 large dimensions is not exactly zero, it doesn't matter how small it is compared to the probability amplitude of other numbers of dimensions. It would be like asking for the probability amplitude the present pope is Chinese. We know that he is German, even though there are far more Chinese than there are Germans. Similarly, we know our universe has 3 large space dimensions, and so even though other numbers of large dimensions may have a greater probability, we are interested only in histories with 3. p141

Be nice to your robot

How can we tell if an alien or robot has free will?... As we said earlier, we can't even solve exactly the equations for 3 or more particles interacting with each other. Since an alien the size of a human would contain a thousand trillion trillion particles, even if he were a robot or machine, it would be impossible to solve the equations and predict what it would do. We would therefore have to say than any complex being has free will – not as a fundamental feature, but as an effective theory, an admission of our inability to do the calculations that would enable us to predict its actions. P178

The big net zero

One requirement any law of nature must satisfy is that it dictates that the energy of the isolated body surrounded by empty space is positive, which means that one has to do work to assemble the body. That's because if the energy of an isolated body were negative, it could be created in a state of motion so that its negative energy was exactly balanced by the positive energy due to its motion. If that were true, there would be no reason that bodies could not appear anywhere and everywhere [at anytime, all of the time!]. Empty space would be unstable... If the total energy of the universe must be zero, and it costs positive energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing? That is why there must be a force like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative: one has to do work to separate gravitationally bound systems. This negative energy can balance the positive energy needed to create matter... Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner we have described. P180

The Survivor's Club by Ben Sherwood ***

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 02:42:00 +0000

If this book helps to save your life at least just once, it is well worth a read, don't you think?

You'll learn the best place to sit on a plane, and what do when it crashes, because - yes - over 95% of passengers survive the impact. So get moving; you only have 90 seconds to safety.

When it pays to be optimistic (when you have some control in your outcome), and when it doesn't (when you have no control).

The odds of surviving a leap from the Golden Gate Bridge, and the best way to enter the water to increase them.

You'll discover the steps to becoming luckier and more resilient.

And last, but not least, if your luck runs out, the book will tell you the best place to have a heart attack.

Being optimistic can be hazardous to your health

When Admiral James Stockdale (a POW of the Vietnam war) was asked to explain which prisoners perished in captivity, the admiral replied 'Oh, that's easy. The optimists.' Everyone was perplexed, so he went on 'The optimists were the ones who said we're going to be out by christimas. Christmas would come and go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.' p41

Catching a plane? Here are the odds of making it back...

What are your chances of dying on your next flight? 1 in 60 million. That means you could fly every day for 164,000 years before your odds would be 1 to 1... Even if you did crash, your odds of survival are 95.7%. Excluding those accidents where no one had a chance at survival, even in the most serious accidents your odds are 76.6%. Contrary to popular opinion, the most likely outcome of an accident is that most occupants will survive... But this is the danger. When people believe there's nothing they can do to save themselves, the put themselves at even greater risk. They drink on the plane, sleep with a mask, take off their shoes, etc. If the plane crashes, they figure it doesn't matter if they're drunk, barefoot and blindfolded: they're dead anyway... But 40% of fatalities in plane crashes occur in situations that are survivable. p59

Why plane crashes freak us out, even though more us will exit from disease and auto accidents

Page 1 coverage of airplane accidents was 60 times greater than HIV/AIDS, 1500 times greater than auto accidents, and 6000 times greater than cancer. p58

Don't sit and wait to be told what to do in an emergency

People don't often panic in the crazy sense, but more often they do nothing to save themselves; this is called negative panic... The current theory of behavioral inaction goes like this: as your frontal lobes process the sight of an airplane wing on fire, they seek to match the information with memories of similar situations in the past. If you have no stored information of a plane crash, your brain can't find a match and gets stuck in a loop of trying and failing to come up with the right response. Hence: immobility. The military calls this the dislocation of expectation... Researchers believe this has less to do with fear and confusion and more to do with the novelty of the situation and the lack of leadership... People do nothing. They just wait for instructions. And they often die. p63

Get younger, lose weight, and be a guy to get out quicker

According to FAA safety research, the best odds for surviving a plane crash go to young, slender men. Agility and strength make the biggest difference when you're trying to wriggle out of airplane wreckage... 31% of difference in evacuation time depends on personal characteristics... The bottom line is that older, bigger women are less nimble and strong; they have suffer the worst odds. p65

Rules for surviving a plane crash.

1. You only have 90 seconds to escape if there's a fire. The aluminum skin of the plane will melt after that.

2. The first 3 minutes and the last 8 minutes of the flight are the most dangerous (80% of all crashes occur during those times). If you're paying attention you can increase your odds.

3. Always have an action plan. Know where the nearest 2 exits are, and count the rows. In thick smoke you won't see them.

4. Decide ahead of time who will take care of the kids or elderly between you and your flight companion. Don't wait until the heat of the moment.

5. Be prepared to claw and climb your way out over other who are frozen or incapacitated. The FAA calls this 'competitive' behavior, and suggests that you compete.

6. Avoid bulkhead seats, because the seat in front of you is part of your safety system. In an accident, you ARE going to hit something.

7. Always assume the brace position. It really does help.

8. Always buckle up. The seatbelt can withstand 3000 lbs of force or 17g's.

9. Forget about your luggage or belongings.

10. Cover your skin and feet with non-synthetics. They will melt on your skin.

11. Make a big fuss to those around you about the safety card and exit plan. Influence those around you so no one freezes and blocks your way out. p73-76

The safest seat on the plane

Other factors to consider. Aisle seat survival rate is 64% vs. 58 for a window seat. Front of plane (1st class) is 49% vs. 56% for ahead of and over wing vs. 69% for rear of cabin. So the safest seats on the plane are rear aisle seats within 5 rows of 2 exits. p79

115 million people in the US visit the emergency room each year. That's 315,000 per day or 13,125 per hour. p92

Showing up the ER with a heart puncture and no vitals, you only have a 37-40% chance. A gunshot wound to the heart with no vitals lowers your chance to 4%. Worst of all is blunt trauma from smashing into something like a brick wall, your chances are less than 1%... So here's what to remember: knives are better than guns, which are better than brick walls. p93

Golden Gate Bridge: The world's most exclusive survivor's club.

You have 4 seconds before hitting the water 240 feet below at 75 mph. On impact you'll feel 15,000 lbs per square inch, ripping your organs loose... Even if you survive the impact, you're almost certain to drown. Jumpers can plunge 80 feet under... Since it opened in May 1937, 1250 people have been recorded as suicides. 98% of jumpers die. Compare that with poison - 85%, drug overdose - 88%, wrist slashing - 95%. There are only 28 known survivors... Your best odds are entering the water feet first, but at a slight angle, so you arc through the water instead of plunging straight down. p104-108

Where's the best place to suffer a heart attack?

In major cities like LA and NYC, the odd are less than 3% of surviving. In cities with the best emergency response like Seattle and Boston, it rises to 9%... But the best place in the world has a rate of 53%. It's the Las Vegas Strip, where nearly all casinos have defibrillators and trained staff. p109

USAF's rule of 3 states that you CANNOT survive without:

3 seconds without spirit and hope

3 minutes without air

3 hours without shelter in extreme conditions

3 days without water

3 weeks without food

3 months without companionship or love

Make peace with your maker, or else you're likely to meet him

Patients in religious turmoil had a 6 to 10% greater risk of dying compared to those who weren't.. Patients who felt alienated or unloved by god and attributed their illness to the devil were 19 to 28% more likely to die during a 2 year study. Why can tussling with god kill you? Well, first you have to ask what kind of God do you believe in. Does your belief in god broad enough to encompass both the good and bad in life, or do you have a sugar coated view of god, that he'll always be there for you, and he will never let anything bad happen. If the latter, when something bad does happen, you won't have any way to reconcile that with your view of god. p145

It's who you know that counts when it comes to luck

Most people know about 300 people on a 1st name basis. That means that you're only 2 introductions away from 90,000 people who could bring chance opportunities to your life. If you invited 50 people over for dinner, that means you're only 2 degrees of separation from 4.5 million potential lucky breaks. p192

Trust, not ignore, your gut

Lucky people listen to their hunches and make good decisions without really knowing why... In contrast, unlucky people often ignore their intuition and regret their decision... Lucky people persevere in the face of failure, have an uncanny knack of making their wishes come true. They expect good things to happen... Unlucky people expect bad things to happen... When given an impossible puzzle to solve, 60% of unlucky people say the puzzle is impossible, while only 30% of lucky people said the same... Life's best survivors react to disruptive change forced on them as though it is a change they desired. p192-4

5 Step Luck School

1. Sign a 'Luck Declaration' in which you pledge to incorporate these principles for 1 month

2. Identify your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to fortune. Do you maximize chance opportunities in life? Do you listen to your lucky hunches? Do you turn bad luck into good?

3. Meet new people and expand your network of luck, and practice a relaxed attitude to life, open yourself up to new experiences, paying more attention to your gut instincts.

4. Keep a luck journal, jotting down fortunate events.

5. Take your time creating a lucky life. Lucky people have developed ways of thinking that make them especially happy, successful and satisfied with their lives. p204

The average increase is 40%. One english computer company tried it and raised productivity by 20%.

Hey lefties, wanna live 9 years longer? Switch hands ASAP

The older you get, the fewer lefties you'll find. Among 10 year olds, 15% are left handed. By age 50, it shrinks to 5%. Jump to age 80, and its only 1%. And only .5% by 85... One explanation is that lefties become righties, but researchers reject this because it's too difficult and unlikely for so many people to change... After studying 2857 CA death certificates, they discovered that left handers die 9 years earlier than right handers (4 years and 10 months for women, and 10 years and 1 month for men). Lefties are 89% more likely to end up in severe accidents, and 6 times more likely to die in them. p205

Asians should take an aspirin on the 3rd of every month

On the 4th of every month there's a 13% spike in heart attacks among Asian Americans. In CA, there's a 27% jump among this group. In many asian languages the words for four and death are almost identical. Indeed in the far east, many hospitals and hotels avoid the number 4. p225

Fight on, never surrender, and skip the stiff upper lip nonsense. It's life or death.

A 1979 British study of breast cancer victims found that 75% of women with a 'fighting spirit' had a favorable outcome vs. only 30% for the helpless and stoic groups... It should be noted that 88% of the women in the study fell into the helpless or stoic groups, but they only represented 46% of the 5 year survivors.... The authors concluded after doing research that the fighting spirit won't prolong your life, but helplessness and hopelessness may actually shorten it. p236

Have something to live for

A researched studied 1333 famous people from history, and discovered a dip in deaths before their birthdays, and a peak afterward. He went to study regular people, and found that they too can postpone death for special occasions. "People postpone death in order to participate in social ceremonies. Because they are so attached to society, they die post-maturely." p249

Maybe surprise birthday parties after age 50 aren't such a good idea

Women are more likely to die in the week following their birthday than in any other week of the year. Men's deaths peaked before their birthdays... Thus a birthday is a 'deadline' for males, but a 'lifeline' for women. p250

A spoonful of sugar helps the post traumatic stress go down

Studies of soldiers who endured severe physical and mental stress during survival training revealed that ingesting carbohydrates helped the troops recover quicker physically and cognitively... In the future, medics may pump soldiers full of maltodextrin or other carbs to accelerate their recovery from stress to get them back into the fight. p270

The Resilience Prescription

1. Practice optimism. Look for the bright side. Don't be delusional or live in denial, but focus on what you can control towards a positive outcome.

2. Choose someone you know or who inspires you, and imitate their example as a resilient role model.

3. Develop a moral compass of unshakable beliefs in ideals and principles greater than yourself.

4. Practice altruism. By helping others you can help yourself feel better during tough times.

5. Develop cognitive flexibility, meaning an ability to learn and adapt your knowledge and thinking to new situations

6. Face your fears, and learn to control negative emotions

7. Build active coping skills to handle your problems

8. Establish a supportive social network to help you

9. Stay physically fit

10. Laugh as much as you can

p271 - see Dr. Dennis Charney of Mt Sinai School of Medicine NYC for more details

Killer Initials

In 1999, researchers studied 3500 men and women with good and bad initials (good included ACE, WIN, WOW & VIP; bad included RAT, BUM, SAD, & DUD), and determined if they had anything to do with how long people lived. The results were stunning. As far fetched as it may sound, they concluded that your initials can actually influence the time and cause of your death. It can add 4 years to your life, or subtract 3 years from it.... How do bad initials kill? Cumulatively over a lifetime. They build up as a little tiny source of stress or they crush your will to live in some way. The impact isn't immediate. Instead, like compound interest, it accumulates over years... Conversely seeing FOX, HUG, or GOD as your initials on your key chain or robe every day can add up to something positive over a lifetime... 2 Pomona economics professors examined the same data and concluded that initials have no effect. p275

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER

- Spock, Star Trek

** The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain by Barbara Strauch

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:52:00 +0000

There is a silver lining to the dark cloud of your aging brain. You'll perform better and longer than you thought possible, after Strauch shares what science knows about aging brains.
Key takeaways:

Leverage your knowledge, and realize that the older you are the slower you will learn new tasks.
Your brain is going to slowly waste away. The more interconnected it is by education and challenge, the longer you will delay the negative symptoms of this fact of life (and death).
Exercise will help your brain stay healthy and young.
Diet may also help, but not for the reason you originally thought, and it may explain why you have to eat the whole food, not just pop a pill. Surprisingly, it's the toxins in the food that may be helping you.

Wisdom proven
Researchers found that 40-60 year olds did better on test of the most important and complex cognitive skills than the same group of people had done when in their 20s... In 4 out of 6 categories tested - vocabulary, verbal memory, spatial orientation, and inductive reasoning - people performed best between the ages of 40 to 65. p14

Faster doesn't always mean better
In areas of processing speed, younger flight controllers did better. But in 2 important cognitive areas - visual orientation, and dealing with ambiguity, - older controllers did just as well. Studies of pilots find the same thing... Older pilots took longer to catch on to the new tests, but they outperformed younger pilots when it came time to doing what was most important - keeping planes where they were supposed to be. p21

Empty nest syndrome is a hoax
Every year incoming freshman to college say that their parents must be devastated by their absence. But nothing could be further from the truth. Researchers have found that the parents are doing just fine. p60

Why you can't remember what's his face's name
If our brains are doing so well in middle age, then why do names go missing in the first place? Researchers speculate that it is because of the way words are stored and organized in the brain. The sound of a word - phonology- and the meaning of the word are stored in different areas and the connection between them weakens as we age. And since the link between a name and a person is arbitrary, this weak link doesn't give us much to go on... At the same time we remember well what a person does, that's because a person's occupation embodies a wide range of information that's stashed all over the brain, and can be retrieved through various paths. p72

Education; instant gratification's mortal enemy
The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income. Education may somehow teach people to delay gratification, a habit that might mean you give up that cookie or cigarette and instead take a walk. p112

Education doesn't ward off disease, it just helps cope with the symptoms
Was it simply that those with better brains sought more education and then developed even better brains as a result? Or were those who were inclined to become more educated simply people who had better nutrition while young or had lives that were generally more protected from toxins that could harm the brain?... Researchers found that those with less than 8 years of education were twice as likely to become demented and those who had even lower education were 3 times as likely. The only way these folks differed was in their education... In two other studies, demented patients who had higher education declined and died faster AFTER being diagnosed, but this diagnosis occurs later in life on average. While on the surface that seems counterintuitive. It seems that the education doesn't stop the ravages of Alzheimer's or other brain wasting diseases at all, rather education provides more neural interconnections such that the brain can better cope with the damage caused by aging and disease without marked overall decrease in performance, until the disease progression finally overwhelms the brain. Then the decline is steep and quick. It suggest that those who can call on more brain power can hold back the outward signs of the disease. Then by the time the disease becomes outwardly evident, its affects are much further along and those patients get worse and die faster. But these patients have less time to live with the effects and that seems like a good thing. p113-4

Exercise helps your memory, but will it help me remember to exercise?
Exercising mice created twice as many new brain cells as non-exercisers... Exercise was not only a potent producer of new neurons, but also seemed to selectively target the brain's dentate gyrus - the middle of the brain's memory machinery - an area that appears to decline with the normal aging process. This means that exercise may, in fact, help boost our memories as we age. p128

Brain food is real, at least for rats
Test tube experiments have shown that brain tissue taken from older animals is more sensitive to oxidative stressors than similar tissue from young animals. By middle age, there are already indicators of increased inflammation in the brains of animals. But food seems to help. Older rats fed a diet of spinach learned new tasks much faster than those fed plain rat chow. Rats fed blueberries, spinach, and spirulina had less brain cell loss and improved recovery of movement following a stroke. p156

And for dogs too!
Beagles fed a diet of fruits, vegetables and vitamins and allowed to exercise could, even in old age, learn new tricks faster than other dogs. The dogs that did the best had their diets fortified mostly with anti-oxidants, including tomatoes, carrots, citrus, spinach, and vitamins E & C. p157

Nietzsche was right! That what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger
Reducing calories activates mild stress that upregulates growth factors that protect cells against aging and disease. And this may very well be how antioxidants are really working as well. Researchers think it is the TOXINS in such things as the skin of a grape, which is there to ward off insects giving us resveratrol, that produce this mild stress that prompts beneficial repair... The benefit of fruits and vegetables might not be because of the antioxidants and vitamins, but because the toxins are producing mild stress. p165 - See Mark Mattson, Chief of Neurosciences at National Institute on Aging.

40 really is the new 20!
Stanford economist, John Shoven came up with entirely new way calculating when we are over the hill. He argues that our true age should be determined not by years, but by years left to live... That means if you have less than a 1% risk of dying within a year, you can consider yourself 'young', and you're not old until you have a 4% chance of dying within a year. In between, you're middle aged... Under this interpretation men don't become old until 73, and women until 78. Middle age starts at 58 for men, and 63 for women. p195

You are not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier **

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:58:00 +0000

The internet and new technology has brought us many things to be thankful, but Lanier is concerned that it is actually slowing down our creativity, and that Moore’s law will help to actually slow down cultural change. He points out how the new technology is stifling us in ways, and he suggests some alternatives. But I have to say that evolution is not one to pick the best design or best possible solution, only the most expedient solution given the tools at hand. That is how I view the path that technology takes and the solutions that win out. It is in a sense survival of the fittest. I view Lanier's approach as a desire for intelligent design opposing the laissez faire approach of invisible hand. - Ben

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world. ..Finance was transformed by computational clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles... Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise, dominated by mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups. P20

Lanier talks about how crowd/cloud solutions should be limited to domains where the cloud cannot frame it’s own questions and its answers should never be more complicated than a single number or multiple choice answer… Problems that have both complex outcomes and unknown distributions of outcomes should be taboo for crowds.

Crowds and clouds do a very poor job of innovation. They do an excellent job of polishing an existing solution or framework. The open source movement is an example of that. Linux is really a 1960’s operating system based upon a Bell Labs innovations from that era. It is not a fundamentally new construct. Using the crowd to take a new construct, and extrapolate and refine it might be a worthy utilization of the crowd. Asking the crowd to come up with a new, well architectured solution is probably a waste of time.

People will focus on activities other than fighting and killing one another only so long as technologists come up with ways to improve living standards for everyone at once… Expanding wealth is necessary if morality is to have any largescale effect on events, and improving technology is the only way to expand wealth for many people at the same time. P80

If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of teeth, and the search of a lover. Paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd – and Google is earning a lot of pennies. P83

If money is flowing to advertising instead of the content creators like musicians, journalists, and artists, then society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, the people will start to become empty headed and content less. P83

The social contract that exists on the web today is that authors, journalists, musicians, artists, etc. are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self promotion. Culture is to become nothing but advertising. P83

Can the internet spawn new middle classes for the creation of content? Wouldn’t be nice if today there were 3000 musicians making a decent middle class living solely from their music on the web? Then in a few years, 30,000. Then the S curve would manifest itself in full, and there would be 300,000. A new kind of professional musician would thunder onto the scene with the shocking speed of a new social networking site… To my shock, I have had trouble finding even a handful of muscians who are able to survive on the web even after 15 years of the web existing for the masses. P91

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation. The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system. P93

Planet of the Help Desk

Computer technologies built by humans are endlessly confusing, buggy, fussy and error ridden. The icon of employment in the age of information is the help desk. This includes knowledge management, software consulting, data management, etc. We are headed toward Planet of the Help Desk. P94

China’s economic model focuses on manufacturing and thus the routine. India’s economy excels in non-routine services. The US has chosen a different path entirely, by controlling the network that everyone else is forced to pass through… I’ll be an optimist and suggest that America will somehow convince the world to allow us to maintain our privileged role. The admittedly flimsy reasons are that a) we’ve done it before so they’re used to us b) the alternatives are potentially less appealing to many global players, so American centrality is a least bad option. P96

Save those pennies!

Even if robots in the future are able to maintain your health and well being for just a penny, how will you ever earn that penny competing against them? Manual labor will be unpaid because the robots own that work, your creativity and expression would also be unpaid since you would be a volunteer in the army of the long tail. That would leave nothing for you… The only alternative would be to establish a form of socialism. P103

Digitially connected mobs will perform more and more services on a collective volunteer [or super cheap] basis, from medicine to solving crimes, until nearly all service jobs are done that way. The cloud lords that control the network behind these solutions [LiveOps, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Elance are examples today] encourage this way of thinking. This trajectory begs the question of how a person who is volunteering all day long will earn rent money. Will living space be doled out socially by the hive lords? Would be it awarded Digg style? Would you only inherit your space, so that your station in life was predetermined? Or would it be allocated at random? P104

We routinely spend more money incarcerating a thief than the thief stole in the first place. You could argue that it would be cheaper to not prosecute small crimes and just reimburse the victims. But the reason we do is to create a livable environment for everyone not riddled with petty crime… In the same way, the maintenance of liberties of capitalism in a digital future will require general acceptance of a social contract. We will pay a tax to have the ability to earn money from our creativity, expression and perspective. P106

You could stop paying your ISP in exchange for signing up for the new social contract in which you pay for bits. If you access no paid bits, you pay nothing. You would also have the potential to earn money for your bits – such as photos, music, and writings. You’d also pay when you visited the bits of others. The total you paid would on average initially work out to be similar [or less to encourage you] to what you paid for before because that is what the market would bear. Because people are entrepreneurial and would like a chance to try to make money, more and more people will make the transition. P106

About ½ the bits flowing on the internet originated as TV, movie or traditional commercial content. P123

An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force. P125

If you start searching for sequences of letters or characters that appear in each text under similar circumstances, you can start to build a dictionary of correlations. That could produce significant results, even if the correlations don’t always fit perfectly into grammar… Such approaches are incredibly inefficient, often involving 10,000 times as much computing as older methods… But set loose on the internet such a project could begin to erase language barriers. P166

In the 1^st story of language, a protohuman says his 1^st word ‘Ma’ for mother, and teaches it to the rest of tribe. A few generations later, someone comes up with ‘Wa’ for water. Eventually the tribe has enough words for language. In the 2^nd story, the protohumans are making all kinds of weird sounds because evolution allows experimentation as long as it doesn’t interfere with survival. The protohumans are doing a lot of things in groups, and their brains start correlating certain distinctive social vocalizations with certain events. Gradually, a large number of approximate words come into use. There is no clear bound at 1^st between words, phrases, emotional inflection and any other part of language. P169

In the wild songs probably had to be rigid in order for mates to find each other. Birds born with a predilection for musical innovation most likely would have had trouble mating. Once domesticated, the finches are assured the luxury of mating, their song variety exploded. p168

Which word is spiky and which is cloudlike? Bouba and Kiki. Across all cultures and languages Kiki is spiky and Bouba is cloudlike... The ability to make connections across senses might have initially evolved in lower primates as a better way to grasp branches. Here's how it could have happened: the image hitting the retina caused by viewing a tilted branch with an oblique sequence of muscle twitches leading the animal to grab the branch at an angle. This remapping ability became coopted for other kinds of abstraction that humans excel in, such as the bouba/kiki metaphor. p172

The UI for search engines, which have been around for well over a decade, is still based upon the 1960s command line. The UI for the Apple 2 to the Mac took less than a decade to evolve. At this rate, by 2020 we can expect software development to have slowed to near stasis, like a clock approaching a black hole. p181

People live longer as technology improves, so cultural change actually slows, because it is tied more to the outgoing generational clock than the incoming one. p182

Nurture Shock by Po Bronson ***

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:56:00 +0000

Some challenging food for thought for all parents to consider. The first section deals with Carol Dweck’s Mindset – See http://bensbookblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/mindset-by-carol-dweck.html . Another section reveals the surprisingly simple solution to making your kid both a near genius and fit at the same time; just let them sleep as much as possible. You’ll be surprised at how often, and why your kids constantly lie – even to your face. And you’ll learn to how to prevent it. Also, for you new parents, you can save a lot of money in not investing in those baby videos. It will only retard your babies development. Old fashioned interaction is what they need with a real live human being. And educational TV does educate after all. Except it teaches your kids to be verbally and physically aggressive as much or more than violent TV. Read on to learn more…

False praise doesn’t help

For college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem building causes their grades to sink further. Continued appeal of self esteem from parents is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves. P19

Praising kids in the class can hurt

Children believe by age 12 that earning praise from the teacher is not a sign you did well – its actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. They’ve picked up on the pattern that kids who are falling behind get drowned in [false] praise. P20

How we teach our kids to cheat

Students turn to cheating when they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. The child comes to believe that failure is so terrible, that the family can’t acknowledge its existence, depriving the child any opportunity to discuss mistakes or learn from them. P22

American mothers should be more fluent in Chinese mothering

In an experiment of Chinese and American mothers whose children were given a failing test grade, and then allowed to retake the test after speaking with their mothers, it was found that American mothers carefully avoided making negative comments to their children when they failed. They remained fairly upbeat and positive with their child. The majority of the time was spent talking about something other than the testing. But Chinese mothers said you need to improve your concentration, or lets look over your mistakes, and the majority of the time was spent discussing the test and its importance. After the discussion, the Chinese kid’s score the 2^nd test jumped 33%, more than twice the gain of the Americans… The stereotype that the Chinese mothers were cruel or harsh didn’t hold up either. While the words were firm, the mothers smiled and hugged their children every bit as much as the American mothers, and were no more likely to frown or raise their voices. P23

No snoring in the back row

60% of high school kids report extreme daytime sleepiness… Studies show anywhere from 20 to 33% are falling asleep in class at least once a week. P30

Back to the 4^th grade you dunce

A loss of 1 hour of sleep is equivalent to the loss of 2 years of cognitive maturation and development for 6^th graders. P32

Sleep disorders can impair childrens IQ as much as lead exposure. P33

Hey C students, become an A student in just 30 minutes!

Teens who received A’s averaged 15 min more sleep that B students, who in turn averaged 15 min more than C students… Every 15 min counts. P33

A tired brain just can’t change

Tired children can’t remember what they just learned, because tired neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. P34

Because it doesn’t get enough energy

Sleep loss debilitates the body’s ability to extract glucose from blood. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than others – the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for “Executive Function”. So tired people have difficulty with impulse control, and abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions. And a tired brain gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly turning to the same answer it already knows. P34

Seeing the glass ½ empty

Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive and neutral by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdale. The result is that sleep deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine… Sleep deprived college students could remember 81% of words with a negative connotation, like ‘cancer’. But they could remember only 31% of words with a positive or neutral connotation like ‘sunshine’ or ‘basket’. P35

World's best, cheapest and proven SAT prep – way better than Kaplan!

The best known study is from Edina, MN where an affluent HS changed its start time from 7:25 to 8:30. In the preceding year, the math/verbal SAT scores for the top 10% of the schools 1600 students was 683/605. A year later, it was 739/761… While the evidence is compelling 85% of high schools start before 8:15am, and 35% before 7:31am p36

Watching TV doesn’t lead to fat couch potatoes

Obese kids watch no more TV than non-obese kids… Kids don’t trade TV for physical activity. If the TV is off, then don’t play soccer, they do some other sedentary activity. P40

How Sleep Loss makes you fatter

Sleep loss increases the hormone ghrelin, which signals hunger, and decreases its metabolic opposite, leptin, which suppresses appetite. Sleep loss also elevates the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is lipogenic, meaning it stimulates your body to make fat. P40

2 hours can make you 3 times as likely to be a fatty

All studies point in the same direction: on avg, children who sleep less are fatter than children who sleep more… In a study of Canadian, Japanese and Australian young boys, they showed that having less than 8 hours of sleep led to a 300% higher rate of obesity than those who get 10 hours… Among middle and high schoolers, the odds of obesity went up by 80% for EACH hour of lost sleep. P41

Lying like clockwork

In a study observing children in their homes, 4 year olds will lie once every 2 hours, while 6 year olds will lie once every hour. And 96% of all kids studied offered up lies. P80

The literal truth

Kids don’t believe a mistake or something forgotten is acceptable excuse. The only thing that matters is that the information is wrong. So if you promise to come to his game, and you get into an accident and miss it; you missed it and you lied about coming. Any false statement - regardless of intent or belief – is a lie. P81

Be proud of your budding little liar

Kids who start lying at age 2 or 3 do better on tests of academic prowess. Lying is related to intelligence. P82

Lying is addictive – because it works

Lying is a symptom – often of a bigger problem behavior. It is a strategy to keep themselves afloat… In studies of 6 year olds, many simply grow out of it. But if lying has become successful for handling difficult social situations, she’ll stick with it. And 1/3 of kids do. If they continue lying at 7, then it seems likely they’ll continue. They’re hooked. P83

Crying wolf doesn’t help anyone including the reader

Which story will have a bigger impact on preventing kids from lying? The boy who cried wolf, or George Washington and the cherry tree? 75% said the Wolf. But this story did not cut down on lying at all in a study, and in fact, kids lied a little more than usual. Meanwhile, the Cherry tree story reduce lying a whopping 75% in boys and 50% in girls. Why does that happen? The shepherd boy pays the ultimate price in being eaten, but that lies get harsh punishment is not news to children. When asked if lies are always wrong, 92% of 5 year olds say yes. And if asked if why they are wrong, it is because they get punished! Young kids process the risk of lying by considering only their self protection. It isn’t until age 11 that the majority demonstrate awareness of its harm to others. At 11, 48% say the problem with lying is that it destroys trust, and 22% say it carries guilt, but even then 33% still say the problem is being punished. P84

How to get your kid to stop lying to you

What really works is to tell the child ‘I will not be upset with you if you [did something bad] AND if you tell the truth, I will be really happy.’ This is an offer of both immunity and a clear route back to good standing. Young kids are lying to make you happy – trying to please you. So telling kids that the truth will make a parent happy challenges the kid’s original thought that hearing good news – not the truth – is what will please the parent. That’s why the George Washington and the Cherry Tree works so well. P86

Giftedness doesn’t seem to be a permanent condition

If you picked 100 kindergartners as gifted, by 3^rd grade only 27 would still deserve that designation. P97

Oh brother, how we love to argue 18% of the time

Studies show that siblings between ages 3 & 7 clash 3.5 times per hour, adding up to 10 minutes spent arguing… Only 1 in 8 conflicts end in a compromise or reconciliation… Siblings made 7 times as many negative and controlling statements to their siblings as they did to friends. P120

And he just keeps coming back for more

Kids don’t have an incentive to behave nicely to their siblings, compared to friends, because the siblings will be there tomorrow, no matter what. Sibship is a relationship in which the boundaries of social interaction can be pushed to the limit. Rage and irritation need not be suppressed, whilst politeness and toleration can be neglected. P121

He who dies with the most toys is the winner after all

In a survey of 108 sibling pairs asking exactly what they fought about, parental affection was ranked dead last at just 9%. The most common reason was the sharing of toys by 80%. Nothing else came close. P127

Let them sort it out

Notes from p257: Scholars have found that parents’ intervention in their children’s argument can actually make things worse. Often their focus is on forcing the children to share a fought over toy, or to divert one child from the conflict – but then they deprive the kids of an opportunity to learn negotiation or respect for other’s needs. Even worse is when a parent just ends the argument with ‘That’s enough – I’ve had it with you two!’ Because the parent is then exhibiting the same sort of self centered, unilateral power play that the children are attempting.

They all lie, even the good students

96% of teens reported lying to their parents. Being an honors student doesn’t change these number by much, nor does being really busy. No kid is too busy to break a few rules. P139

Because they don’t want to hurt you

The most common reason for deception was ‘I’m trying to protect the relationship with my parents. I don’t want them to be disappointed in me.’ P139

Don’t be their friend. Be a parent.

Kids who go wild and get in to the most trouble have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take a lack of rules as a sign that the parent doesn’t care, that the parent doesn’t really want the job of being a parent. P139 Kids, even teens, want parental protection.

And face it, they won’t ever tell you EVERYTHING

78% of parents were sure their teens could talk to them about anything. However teens disagreed. To seek out a parent for help is a tacit admission that he’s not mature enough to handle it alone. Having to tell parents about it can be psychologically emasculating, whether the confession is forced out or if it is volunteered. It’s essential for some things to be ‘none of your business’. P140

Beware of your rebellious preteen

The big surprise is when this need for autonomy is strongest. It’s not mild at 12, moderate at 15, and most powerful at 18. It actually peaks at 14 to 15, and is in fact slightly stronger at 11 than at 18! P140

How you lead them to depression

For those unfortunate kids who have oppressively strict parents, the teens don’t rebel and are obedient. But they are depressed. P140

How to stay connected

Set a few rules over key areas of influence, and explain those rules. Expect your child to obey them, and support their autonomy outside these areas. The kids of these parents lied the least. P141

Controlling them leads to drinking and drugs

Studies confirm that kids turn to drinking and drugs because they are bored in their free time… But even the really busy kids could be bored, for 2 reasons. First they were doing lots of activities only because their parents signed them up – there was no intrinsic motivation. Second, they were so accustomed to their parents filling their free time that they didn’t know how to fill it in on their own. The more controlling the parent, the more likely the child is to experience boredom. P142

Argue alot and have a happy family

In families with less deception, there was a much higher ratio of arguing/complaining. Arguing was good – arguing was honesty… But 46% of mothers rated their arguments as destructive to the relationship, while only 23% of their daughters felt that way. Far more believed that arguing strengthened the relationship with their mother. They saw fighting as a way to see their parents in a new way, as a result of hearing their mother’s point of view be articulated… The daughters who rated arguing destructive had parents who stonewalled rather than collaborated. The daughters heard ‘Don’t argue with me!’ before even uttering a word. P149

Bend but don’t break

Parents who negotiate ultimately appear to be more informed about their children. Parents with unbending, strict guidelines make it a tactical issue for kids to find a way around them. P150

Why looking into their eyes and asking for the truth doesn’t help

Notes from p251: Study after study show that gaze aversion (look into my eyes and tell me the truth) has little if any relation to a person’s lying. Gaze aversion is even less of a signal for children: they frequently look away from a conversation partner when they are concentrating… Scholars hypothesize that gaze aversion comes from a different emotional state altogether: around the world, people look down at the ground as an indication of shame. Therefore, there’s an errant assumption that liars are ashamed of their falsehood and thus will look away.

Why driver’s ed is deadly

School districts that eliminated Driver’s Ed experienced a 27% drop in auto accidents among 16 and 17 year olds… States which delay the age at which a teen can drive at night or with friends decrease crashes by 20 to 30%. P158

The power of imagination

In a famous study, children were told to stand still as long as they could – they lasted only 2 minutes. Then a 2^nd group was asked to pretend they were soldiers on guard who had to stand still at their posts – they lasted 11 minutes! P166

Why she can’t focus

One subsystem of the brain is supposed to measure how well you’re doing on whatever you’re supposed to be doing. When it senses you’re not doing well enough, it signals another subsystem, which allocates more cognitive control: it improves your concentration. Many children first subsystem is not well developed, and thus the child is not only not able to concentrate, she’s not even aware that she needs to concentrate. P172

It’s vital for children to develop an awareness of how well they’re doing and when their work is completed accurately. This sensitivity is required for the feedback system to function, and for concentration to be increased. P172 Kids should check each other’s work, and check their own work against scoresheets.

The adult brain has a specialized region in the frontal lobe devoted to regulating rules. This rules region allows people to be proactive: the recognize circumstances where rules will apply, as if glancing ahead in time, preloading the brain for what to do. School children however don’t yet have this region to draw upon; rather than proact, their brains react. Stumbling, trying to get the rules straight, their error rate is high. P173

How to get them addicted to self motivation

When a child gets to choose his own activity or work, they choose activities they’re motivated to do. This motivation is crucial. It is experienced in the brain as a release of dopamine, where it is spritzed onto large areas of the brain, which enhances the signaling of neurons. The motivated brain literally operates better, signals faster. When children are motivated they learn. P173

Steps to a better kid

Have your child write down a plan for how they’ll spend their day or afternoon. When they get distracted, refer them back to their plan. When children make an error, rather than correct it, point to the line or the page containing the mistake and ask the child to find it. This makes them think critically about what they’re doing rather than mechanically completing an assignment. When doing something repetitive (like writing practice) have them choose their best example to show you. When learning something new, especially for younger children, have them use private speech ‘Start at the top and go around to draw a C’. Use buddy reading, where you take turns reading from a book, and having the child describe what you’ve read to hone their listening and talking skills as well as reading. Lastly, prompt the child to encourage them to extend the imagination in play. When the child is playing, and comes to stop ask what they were doing earlier, and then encourage the scenario to continue by providing some good ideas. “Why don’t you wake up your baby now so she can go to school on a field trip?” This can lead to another hour of imaginative play. P174 Tricks from Tools of the Mind to encourage self directed play and work.

We should ban Sesame Street and Sponge Bob

The more educational media (TV/video) the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were. They were increasingly bossy, controlling and manipulative. This wasn’t a small effect. It was stronger than the connection between violent media and physical aggression… In fact, watching education TV also increased the rates of physical aggression, almost as much as watching violent TV… The more the kids watched, the crueler they’d be to their classmates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than that between violent media and physical aggression… Researchers theorized that many educational shows spend most of the ½ hour establishing a conflict between characters and only a few minutes resolving that conflict. Preschoolers have a hard time being able to connect information at the end of the show to what happened earlier. It is likely that the child doesn’t learn the overall lesson, but instead learns from each behavior shown. P180

Just pull the plug

96% of children’s programming includes verbal insults and put downs, averaging 7.7 incidents per ½ hour. Even 67% of ‘prosocial’ programs contained insults… Of the over 2628 put downs the team identified in their survey of shows, in only 50 was the insulter reprimanded or corrected – and not once in an educational show. Fully 84% of the time, there was only laughter or no response at all. P182

They know you don’t get along all the time so don’t pretend

The typical couple has 8 disputes per day. Spouses express anger 2 or 3 times as often they show a moment of affection. Children witness 45% of these disputes. P184

You have to make up – in front of them

In one study 1/3 of children acted aggressively after witnessing a staged parent conflict. But in that same study something else happened that eliminated the aggressive reaction in all but 4% of the children. What was that magical thing? Letting the child witness not just the argument, but the resolution of the argument. When the process was stopped mid-argument, it had a very negative effect. But if the child was allowed to see the contention worked out, it calmed him… If the parents pause mid-argument to take it upstairs – to spare the children – and then forget to tell the kids that they worked it all out – then may make the situation far worse. P185

Resolution leads to a better kid

Researchers have recently shown that being exposed to marital conflict can actually be good for children – if it doesn’t escalate, insults are avoided, and the dispute is resolved with affection. This improves the sense of security, over time, increases their prosocial behavior at school. But the resolution has to be sincere, not manipulated for their benefit – or they’ll see through it. Kids learn a lesson in conflict resolution: the argument gives them an example of how to compromise and reconcile. P185

Why spanking really hurts them

When physical discipline (spanking) was saved only for the worst offenses, the parent was usually very angry, and had lost his/her temper. The implicit message was ‘What you have done is so deviant that you deserve a special, harsh punishment, which is spanking.’ It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society. When spanking was done as an accepted practice in a culture, it becomes the normal thing, and the kid is not traumatized by being considered a deviant. P187

Why Disney’s Baby Einstein had to pay everyone back their money

Babies brains don’t learn to recognize foreign language phonemes off a video or audio tape [eg. Baby Einstein] at all. They absolutely do learn from live human speech. In an experiment, American babies were taught to recognize Mandarin phonemes in just twelve 20 minute sessions over 1 month with Chinese speaking graduate students. The babies were virtually as good at recognizing Mandarin phonemes as the brains of native born Chinese infants. But when American infants were put in front of audio and video tapes of Mandarian speech, their brains absorbed none of it. They might as well have heard meaningless noise. This was true despite seeming to be quite engaged by the videos… Why the difference? Studies have shown repeatedly that seeing a person’s face makes huge difference in how the baby learns speech. P202

Early response

Studies have shown that there is great variability within a sample, with some tots hitting some language development milestones far earlier, and others far later. The variable that best explained these gaps was how often a mom rapidly responded to her child’s vocalizations and explorations. The toddlers of high responders were a whopping 6 months ahead of low responders, saying their 1^st words at 10 mos, and reaching other milestones at 14. p204

Don’t expect them to be thankful

Children will not experience gratitude unless they recognize 3 things about the bounty in their lives: that they are intentional, costly, and beneficial. Younger children may not be able to comprehend this, and thus may not show improvements in happiness from conducting gratitude exercises… Also, not everyone benefits from gratitude exercises as it turns out. Only those who are low in positive affect – or people who rarely experienced excitement, hope, strength, interest, and inspiration. In fact, for people who are highly positive, the gratitude exercises can make them feel worse or less happy. Why is that? Well, for people with a strong need for autonomy and independence, it might be demoralizing to recognize how much they are dependent upon others or grownups. P235

**** Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:19:00 +0000

This book will challenge everything you know about talent. The Webster definition of talent is “the natural endowments of a person” not the skills learned through hours and hours practice and experience. Well, perhaps it’s time to rewrite the dictionary, and redefine what it takes to be a talented individual. Now don’t get your hopes way up and think that if you’re lacking talent, that you can simply follow some quick formula and acquire it. Oh no, it may not be inborn as you thought previously, but it’s the next hardest thing from that. It’s gained via laborious, obsessive, deliberate, mindful practice. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year for at least ten years for most vocations. Yes, TEN years! Maybe it would have been easier to have chosen the right mom and dad after all. So what are you waiting for? Get to work, and in only 10 years you’ll be talented!

Don’t we all believe that some folks are just gifted?

More than 75% of education professionals believed that singing, composing, and playing concert instruments requires a special gift or talent; which is a higher proportion than for any other field. p17

There are no short cuts

257 music students were divided into 3 groups based upon achievement; top, middle, bottom. Judged by early signs of special talent, all 3 groups were highly similar, and they all started playing around age 8... The avg hours of practice needed by the most elite group and the least elite group was the same to graduate to the next level achievement - about 1200 hours of practice for each group member to reach level 5. The elite group members reached the higher level simply because they practiced more each day. They practiced 2 hours/day vs. 15min/day for the lowest group... Nothing it turned out, enabled any group to reach any given level without putting in those hours. "There's absolutely no evidence of a fast track for high achievers." p19

What about Mozart? Surely he was talented at birth?

Mozart's 1st 4 piano concertos were composed at age 11, but they actually contain no original music by him. He put them together by combining works by other composers. His next 3 at 16, also contained no new music but were arrangements of Bach, whom Mozart had studied under. Today, none of these are regarded as great music, and they are rarely performed or recorded... His 1st work regarded as a masterpiece was composed when he was 21. An early age, but one must remember that he had been trained in music since age 3 for 18 years... For 200 years people believed that he had a miraculous ability to compose entire pieces in his head. This view is based upon a famous letter that it turns out is a forgery. Mozart didn't conceive whole works in his mind, perfect and complete. Surviving manuscripts show he was constantly revising, reworking, crossing out and rewriting whole sections, and putting them aside for months or years. He wrote music the way ordinary humans do. p26-27

What about Tiger Woods then?

Tiger was born into the home of an expert golfer who loves to teach. His mother doesn't work outside the home, and he's an only child. Tiger is the 1st priority in the marriage. He received his 1st putter at 7 months (not years!). He'd watch his dad hit balls into a net for hours on end, while in his high chair... At age 19, he became a member of the Walker cup (though he didn't win). At that point he had been practicing intensely for 17 years... Asked to explain his uncommon success, father and son always gave the same reason: hard work. p30-31

High IQ doesn’t equal High Achievement

Among workers, the avg IQ increases with the complexity of the work, which seems totally unsurprising... The trouble starts when we dig beneath the averages... A wide range of studies shows that the correlations between IQ and achievement aren't nearly as strong as the data on broad averages would suggest, and in many cases there's no correlation at all. p42

Nor does it equal great sales people or chess or scrabble players

Bosses tend to think that smarter sales people will sell more, but when compared to actual sales results, they found no such correlation... In games like Chess, scrabble, and go, you'd think IQ would correlate with performance. Yet researchers have found some chess grand masters with lower than normal IQs. It's a similar story for Go, the japanese game equivalent in complexity to chess. And some top Scrabble players score below avg on test of verbal ability. p44

IQ helps for UNFAMILIAR tasks

The strength of IQ as a predictor of chess achievement dropped drastically as children worked and got better, and IQ was of no value in predicting how quickly they would improve. Many studies of adults in the workplace have shown the same pattern. IQ is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a while, IQ predicts nothing about performance. p45

Go figure?

The Czech chess master Richard Reti once played 29 blindfolded games simultaneously. Afterward he left his briefcase at the exhibition site, and commented what a poor memory he has. p46

They’re mere mortals after all

Chess masters don't have incredible general purpose memories. What they have was an incredible ability to remembe real chess positions and patterns, honed from hours of practice and study. If you scramble the chess board randomly (not with actual chess positions), the chess master can barely perform better than a non-player in remembering where the pieces are placed. p47

You better learn to work around that personality of yours. You’re stuck with it

Are you stuck with the personality traits you have? Research going back decades suggest that personality dimensions don't vary much over the course of a person's life. But this doesn't limit a person's ability to achieve; it may limit only the fields in which a person is most likely to excel. p48

What have discovered about what makes people excel?

- It's not experience. There's some evidence that some people in a wide range of fields actually get worse after years of doing something.

- It's not inborn talents. Many untalented folks have achieved amazing things.

- It's not general abilities like IQ and memory. p51

Practice early and often. And then goto sleep early and often.

Let's go back to the study of the 257 violinists. All 3 groups were spending the same total amount of time on music related activities - 51 hours/week. All 3 agreed that solo practice was the number one activity to improve performance. They all knew it, and had the time, but they all didn't do it. The 2 top groups solo practiced 24 hours/week vs. 9 hours/week for the bottom group. As for pleasure, solo practice ranked near the bottom of all activities, including formal performances... The top 2 groups did most of their practicing in the late morning or early afternoon, when they were still fairly fresh. The bottom group group practiced mainly in the late afternoon, when they were more likely to be tired. The top 2 groups also slept more at night and took more naps. All that practicing seems to demand a lot of recovery. p59

If practice equals better performance, then why isn't the best group practicing any more than the middle group?.... The answer lies in the student's histories. By age 18, the 1st group had accumulated on avg 7410 hours of lifetime practice vs. 5301 hours for the middle, and 3420 for the third. p60 1 5, 2 4

The 10 year rule

In a famous study of chess players, the researchers proposed the 10 year rule, that no one reaches the highest level w/o 10 years of intensive play and practice... Subsequent research in a wide range of fields has substantiated the 10 year rule in math, science, music, swimming, x-ray diagnosis, tennis, literature - no one, not even the most 'talented' performers became great w/o at least 10 years of very hard preparation. p61 3 1

A study of 76 composers from many historical periods looked at when they produced their 1^st notable works or masterworks. Of over 500 works, only 3 were composed before year 10 of the composer’s career, and those 3 were produced in years 8 and 9… In a similar study of painters, the same pattern although the period was shorter – 6 years. A study of 66 poets found a few who produced notable works in less than 10 years, but none in less than 5; 55 of the 66 needed 10 or more years. P152

Like a fine wine, you’re still getting better after 19 years

Many scientists and authors produce their greatest works only after 20 or more years of devoted effort, which means even after 19 years, they are still getting better! p62 1 2, 2 2

It’s never too late to learn to get better

By the late 19th century, research was showing that ordinary people in various lines of work could keep getting better even after their performance had apparently plateaued. These highly experienced workers, whose performance hadn't improved in years, suddenly got markedly better when they were offered incentives or given new kinds of training. 63 1 2,

Experts are made, not born

The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain... This explains high achievement without the concept of talent playing any role. p63 4 3, 5 1

4 hours total practice per day – max with 90 minute max sessions

A finding that is remarkably consistent across disciplines is that 4 or 5 hours a day seems to be the upper limit of deliberate practice, and in sessions lasting lasting no more than 90min... This is true of violinists, chess champions, swimmers.71 2 2

Why companies don’t create talent very well

In fact, life at most companies seems almost intended to defeat all the principles of deliberate practice. What we generally do at work isn't designed by anyone to make us better at anything. Usually it isn't designed at all; we're just given an objective that's necessary for the employer;s goals... And second, the activities that would make us better are usually not highly repeatable. When we face a new or unusual challenge - a competitor's innovation, a shift in customer attitudes - we typically find little past experience to guide us because we've had so few chances to deal with those situations... Deliberate practice demands that we push ourselves to the point where we break down and then develop a solution, in our business lives the cost of mistakes is high. Every incentive urges us to stick with what's safe and reliable… We weren’t hired so we could spend time improving our own abilities; we were hired to produce results p72 b1 2

73 1 1

A better way to develop talent

Companies tend to assign people based on what they’re already good at, not what they to work on. It’s difficult to pull accomplished employees out of jobs they do extremely well and put them into positions where they may struggle. 128 3 3

… One technique to mitigate this: short term work assignments. Managers don’t leave their jobs, but they take on add’l assignments outside their field of expertise. This increases the burden on the employee, but most don’t seem to mind because they realize that they’ve been identified for extra development. p130 3 2

Most employees will never serve on the company’s board, but many can serve on a local non-profit’s board, and the experience is an excellent opportunity to develop strategic thinking, financial analysis, and many other skills. p131 2 3

A telling indicator of future managerial success is how interns get others to work with them when they have absolutely no authority… Another is if the candidate played team sports and what their role was (captain?). p133 3 b4, b1

At AMEX, 25% of an executives pay depends on people development. 135 2 b2

The difference between an amateur and a pro

A study of singers found that when amateurs took a voice lesson, they experienced it as an enjoyable release of tension, but when pros took a lesson, they experienced it as an intense, difficult effort. On the outside, they were doing the same thing, but on the inside they were doing completely different things, and that’s what mattered. p80 2 8

You’re not getting better when its automatic

When we see a great performance, it strikes us that they’ve practiced so long that they can do it automatically. But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically. When we learn to do anything new, we go through 3 stages. The 1^st demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, and learn the rules. In the 2^nd stage, we being to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together, and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge, the situation, and the rules. In the 3^rd stage, we perform with barely a thought. And with that we stop improving… Great performers never allow themselves to reach stage 3 in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice – avoiding automaticity. p82 4 2, 5 1

Find a mentor, or you’re on your own

If you want to play the piano, the exact skills and the order in which to learn them have been worked out by many generations of teachers. It’s similar in highly structured professions for lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc. But in a great many careers, and in the advanced stages of all of them, there is no published curriculum that must be studied and mastered. You’re on your own… Yet in all practice it is highly valuable to get other’s views about you should be working on and how you’re doing. 109 2 3 3 1

Basic skills acquisition

The most obvious way to improve for work involves presentations and speeches. For most people, practice consists of a few run throughs. But now think of all of the ways that practicing could be done much better. One could analyze the text and in each section determine the most important idea to be conveyed – passion, logical inevitability, bonding with audience, humor – and then work on each section repeatedly, constantly striving to express that key idea more effectively, with feedback after each repetition, from a coach or watching a video playback… Is this way more work than anyone you know has ever put into a presentation? But it is exactly the type of practice that great performers put into whatever they do. p110 3 5

Why giving performance reviews suck for everyone involved

One the most dreaded tasks for managers is giving job evaluations. The message can be broken down into pieces and each piece analyzed for intent, then practiced repeatedly with feedback from a coach or video. Even being interviewed during job search or by the media can be practiced in this way. You probably know the key messages you wish to convey regardless of the questions you’re asked. p111 3 2 3 7 4 4 4 6

Watch and learn

Watch a presentation that you consider especially well done, and make note of its various points; later after you’ve forgotten most of it,use your notes to create a talk making the same points, video it, and compare it to the original. P111

The case for the free MBA

Take business classes that apply the case method… Since the correct response isn’t always clear, it’s helpful to hear the perspectives of other students and especially the teacher… You don’t have to go to biz school either; many of the case studies are for sale online. Ask ‘what would you do?’ while reading the paper and listening to the news. Then WRITE IT DOWN and KEEP IT. Comparing your response to what the protagonist actually did is the only way this exercise can yield genuine learning, and that learning will be considerable. 113 2 2, 3 5, 3 8, 3 13, 3 18

Rebuild your foundation

Review your old textbooks that are related to your field so that your fundamental skills become faster, more facile, and more confident… Do math by hand instead of via calculator or worse a spreadsheet. Pencil edit magazine articles. You won’t learn new skills, but you’ll be building the strengths that make your skills possible. 114 b1 1

Web-based simulation games in marketing, stock trading, negotiating, corp strategy, and many other disciplines are widely available. Use these to practice.116

Set goals related to the process necessary for achievement, not the outcome

Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome. The best performers set goals that aren’t about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome. Don’t set the goal on winning the sale, but on discerning the customer’s unstated needs. P117

Focus on what your doing; don’t tune everything out

Average runners tend to think about anything other than running. Elite runners focus intensely on themselves; they count their breaths, simultaneously count their strides in order to maintain certain ratios. P118

Pick stretch goals, not comfortable ones

Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or OK. The best performers judge themselves against a standard that’s relevant to what they’re trying to achieve like comparing against a personal best, or a competitor, or the best performance in their field… The key is to pick a goal that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research tells us that too high a standard produces no advancement. 119 2 b3, 3 3, 3 b4

Stop blaming others, and start blaming yourself

Average performers believe that their errors were caused by factors outside their control; bad luck, task was too hard, I don’t have natural ability. Top performers believe they are responsible for their errors. P119

Figure what went wrong, and how to fix it – then test your theory by doing it again

You reflect on something major and significant that you performed at work. Odds are strong that it was not perfect, and that parts of it were unpleasant. Excellent performers respond by adapting the way the performed to negative outcomes; average performers avoid the negative situations in the future. Average performers with no clear idea why things didn’t go perfectly, and attribute the failures to vague forces outside their control. As a result they’re clueless about how to adapt, so they just avoid going through anything like that again. Which means they have zero chance of getting better… Excellent performers are therefore more likely to repeat the task with a new strategy, and thus perform better next time. p120 2 7, 2 10 3 4

How to become an expert

If you set a goal of becoming an expert in your business, you would study the history of your business, identify the leading experts, read everything you could find, interview people inside and outside your company who could provide new perspectives, track key statistics and trends. It’s quickly apparent that you could make yourself impressively more knowledgeable in short order. With time your knowledge advantage will become large. 121 3 2

Create filters to remove the noise

In a study of top and apprentice pilots who listed to air traffic recordings, the apprentices actually recalled more of the filler words that had no practical significance. But the experts recalled far more of the important concept words. They had heard the communication as part of a rich mental model, they could focus brainpower on what counted. 123 b1 b5

Two groups of firefighters, experts and novices, were shown photos of fires. The novices saw what was obvious – intensity and color of the flames. The experts saw a story; using their mental model to infer what must have led to the current state and to predict what was likely to happen next. 124 1 6

Seeds of trust; become vulnerable

Reciprocal vulnerability is the beginning of trust; so sharing personal stories or revealing feelings is a way to foster that in the workplace. 139 3 b2

Revenge of the Right Brain

For 300 years, the source of economic dominance has clearly been leadership in science and technology, but now that era may now be ending. Technology will be commoditized by China and India, being dispersed and adopted immediately after its created. Economic value will arise instead from the powers of the right brain – creativity, imagination, empathy, aesthetics. Exhibit A – the iPod vs MP3 predecessors. Exhibit B – Target over Walmart. P147

This phenomenon is sufficiently widespread that the MFA degree is gaining ground on the MBA, and some schools are offering a joint MFA/MBA degree. P148

In many creative fields the person who pursues the advanced degree has consciously chosen a path that leads to a professorship not a life of innovating in that domain; those with most formal education are less eminent as innovators. In science and technology it is different. Advanced education is absolutely required; no one is going to cure cancer as a sophomore in high school. P156

No flashes of genius; just more hard work

James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine; he made it more efficient so it could become the engine behind the British industrial revolution… Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin. In fact, many had been invented to remove seeds from long staple cotton, which wasn’t economical to grow on a large scale. His genius was to invent a device that would work on short staple cotton using what came before... The aha moments grow out of hours of thought and study. The idea of an epiphany is a dreamer’s paradise, where people want to believe that things are easier than they are. P159

And what about those legends of great creative products appearing suddenly and fully formed? The answer is simple: they aren’t true. Samuel Coleridge claimed that 100s of lines of came to him in an opium haze for his famous work, Kublai Khan. But an earlier version of the poem was found, and worse, another previous book has passages similar to his own… Abe Lincoln didn’t write his famous address on the back of an envelope while riding a train to Gettysburg as the legend goes. A number of drafts have been found. And as for the original Eureka moment – nothing in Archimedes writings or in writings of his contemporaries supports or hints at the bathtub story. Scholars have concluded that it is a myth. P161

Blind at the top

In a survey of 600 executives, those at the top thought the main reason why their company wasn’t more innovative was that it didn’t have enough of the right people. Lower level managers held a markedly different view – that the right people were present but that the culture kept them from innovating. P163

Blah, blah, blah

Organizations can take 2 steps that are especially effective in light of how innovation really happens: telling people what’s needed, and giving them freedom to innovate… Leaders exhort the troops to be innovative, but no one understands clearly what that means. Unsure where to go, they go nowhere. P164

It’s CYA that rules the day

Most organizations are not intellectually stimulating, even the field itself is fascinating; rather than offering opportunities to learn and rewarding curiosity, it leaves inquisitive employees to find their own ways to learn. And instead of furnishing structure and support – meaning clear roles and responsibilities in a positive, forward looking, build on success environment – many operate in a cover you ass culture. P175

What about starting in the womb?

Starting early holds advantages that become less available later in life… Violinist’s brains devote more territory to the workings of the left hand – the one that plays the notes – than do other people’s brains. This effect is much more pronounced in people who started at an early age. A separate effect involves myelin, the substance that wraps around neurons with practice, insulating and strengthening key connections. Practice in childhood cause myelin to build up more than does practice in adulthood. P171 Oh what a horribly dangerous statement this is. Now many over the top parents are going to start educating their children at the moment of conception in trying to get a head start. What a sad state of affairs for childhood in the 21^st century. L

How to be a good parent

The most stimulating home environments had parents who encouraged the curiosity of their children at an early age, and answered their questions with great care – and who were structured and supportive, with everyone have clear roles, and tasks, and parents going to some lengths to support their children’s practice. P174

You can bet that this will happen to kids in China and India

It would seem possible to train young people several hours a day over years for high achievement in a specific business. It would be possible – but would it be good? The evidence suggests we could do it, yet most of us instinctively reject that idea. Why? We all feel that there is more to life than work, and providing a well rounded education for your child is our hope enriching their life and making them fulfilled . And yet our society has very little problem with kids being directed toward fields other than business at an early age, and having those same kids give up the notion of a broad education by having them focus on a particular field (think Olympic gymnast or Tiger Woods as a child). If other cultures and govt’s decide to focus on turning out managers who are whizzes at age 21, and who will just keep getting better, we will have to confront that reality, and perhaps think again about our own views. P179

Don’t even think about it

Any adult thinking of starting a professional career in any field where participants begin their development as small children should first get out their calculator and face the music, since many of those participants would have logged over 10,000 hours in their childhood, and accumulate over 1500 hours of additional practice each year as an adult. P172

You can age more slowly

As we age, we slow down. Remembering and solving unfamiliar problems take about twice as long in our 60s as in our 20s. So it is surprising to learn that excellent performers manage to continue achieving at high levels well beyond the point where age related declines would seem to make that impossible… Excellent performers do suffer the same age

related decline in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else – except in their field of expertise. P180

But it ain’t easy

Studies have shown that just continuing to work at a job is not enough to stave off age related declines… Deliberate practice is required to maintain that edge and to develop other skills and strategies to compensate for declines that can no longer be avoided. P182

It must come from within

People who rank high for intrinsic motivation consistently produce work that is judged more creative in studies. Conversely, people who work in fields demanding creativity reliably rank higher in intrinsic motivation. P189

It absolutely must come from within

Studies have shown that virtually any external attempt to constrain or control the work results in less creativity. Just being watched is detrimental. Even being offered incentives for doing the work results in less creative output than being offered nothing… Only a few certain external motivators that reinforce intrinsic motivation work effectively. Recognition that confirms competence turned out to be effective. Personal feedback – without expectation of being judged – could actually enhance creativity if was constructive, kind hearted, non threatening, and work focused rather person focused. Rewards that involve more time, freedom, or resources to pursue creativity could be helpful as well. Summary: Intrinsic motivation is best, and extrinsic motivation that’s controlling is detrimental, but extrinsic motivators that reinforce intrinsic drives can be highly effective. P192

What starts the ball rolling?

Instead of compulsive practice producing high ability, high ability leads to compulsive practice. Some kids are born with an ability to learn far more quickly in a particular domain. They practice all the time, setting new goals, and increasing their skills because their ability to learn makes it so rewarding. P196

Getting a head start means nothing if you don’t do the work

Even those cases of child prodigies with proclivities that appear to be innate, studying them doesn’t get us very far. That’s because the large majority don’t grow up to be great performers. A few do, but most don’t maintain the intensely focused daily work for the many years necessary to achieve at the highest levels... Many gifted kids eventually fall apart. They are told they are smart, when they inevitably hit the wall and get stuck, they think they must be dumb. P197 See Carol Dweck’s Mindset.

A very small advantage in some field at an early age can spark a series of events that produce far larger advantages… Each increase in competence is matched to a better environment, and in turn, the environment will be expected to further enhance their competence. P200

Slow and steady wins the race

The beginner’s skills are so modest that he can manage only a little bit of deliberate practice, since its highly demanding. But that little bit, increases that person’s skills making it possible to practice more, which increases the skill level more… This theory fits the evidence… In virtually every field, beginners can’t manage more than 1 hour of practice per day. But by the time they become top performers, they’ve built up a tolerance for 4 to 5 hours per day. P201

Compare yourself to your peers to feel good; intrinsic motivation must be fostered

Researchers have observed that as people start learning skills in virtually any field, they’re typically compared against other’s their own age – not the world’s greatest in that field… One way to get better than others your age is to start training earlier, thus accumulating more deliberate practice. Standing out any age is an excellent way to attract attention and praise, fueling the multiplier effect... Another way to ignite this multiplier effect is to begin learning skills in a place where competition is sparse. It’s a lot easier to stand out as a math whiz in a town of 100 than 100,000. p202

Reprogram your beliefs, and believe that if you put in the work, you’ll achieve – no matter your talent

If you believe that performance is forever limited by your lack of a specific innate gift, or by a lack of general abilities at a level you think must be necessary, then there’s no chance at all that you’ll do the work. That’s why the belief is tragically constraining. Everyone who has achieved exceptional performance has encountered terrible difficulties along the way. There are no exceptions. If you believe that doing the right kind of thing can overcome the problems, then you at least a chance of moving on to ever better performance. Those who see the setbacks as evidence that they lack the necessary gift will give up – they will never achieve what they might have… Above all, what the evidence shouts most loudly is striking, liberating news: that great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone. P206

** Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 06:16:00 +0000

Life is random. Now you have proof. I always like to ponder that my existence has to do with the fact that the sperm on the left or right of the egg didn’t conceive first, otherwise someone else would’ve taken my place. So you are conceived in randomness, and it will rule your life from that moment on. You’d think that owing our existence to randomness would clue us into how to handle it and how to take advantage of it. But it turns out we’re pretty bad at dealing with random things. We always seek patterns, so we weave superstitions and ignore facts to buttress our delusions.

Maybe if I yell louder that will help?

Why do we think that yelling and getting mad at people improves performance, when all studies show that encouragement is the key to change behavior and train others, including animals? The answer lies in regression towards the mean… Here’s how it works in the example of fighter pilots… Any especially good or poor performance was mostly a matter of luck. So a landing far above his normal level of skill would mean that the odds are good that he would perform closer to his norm – that is worse – the next day. And if the instructor praised him, it would appear that the praise did no good. But if a pilot made an exceptionally bad landing, then the odds would be good that the next day he would perform closer to his norm – that is better. And if the instructor screaming ‘you clumsy ape’ when a student performed poorly, it would appear that this harsh criticism did some good. In this way an apparent pattern would emerge: student performs well, praise does no good; student performs poorly, instructor berates student, student improves. P8

When you put it that way it seems to obvious!

Which is greater? – The number of 6 letter English words having an N as their 5^th letter OR 6 letter words ending in ING? Most people choose the ING option. Why? Because such words are easier to think of. But you don’t have to survey the dictionary to prove that guess wrong. The group of words ending in ING are contained in the group of words with N as the 5^th letter. P28

The Greeks had math problems.

The order in which ones, tens, and hundreds didn’t really matter: sometimes all order was ignored. Finally, the Greeks had no zero. The concept of zero (really just the absence of a number) came to Greece when Alexander invaded the Babylonian empire in 331BC, but the idea of zero as we know it (anything multiplied by it equals 0 and anything added to it equals the number you started with), wasn’t introduced until 9^th century by the Indian mathematician Mahavira. P30

And the Romans had Greek problems

The Romans generally scorned math, especially the math of the Greeks… A Greek textbook focused on the proof of congruences among abstract triangles, a typical Roman text focused on such issues as how to determine the width of a river when an enemy is occupying the other bank… The Romans didn’t produce even one mathematician. In Roman culture it was comfort and war, not truth and beauty, that occupied center stage. So while finding little value in abstract geometry, Cicero wrote that “probability is the very guide of life”. P31

Let’s examine DNA trial evidence:

The probability of a lab error is 1 in 100. The probability of someone else matching your DNA is 1 in 1 billion. That is given by our sum rule: the probability of an error is 1% + .000001%. That the latter is 10 million times smaller, we can just round this to 1%. Given both possible causes we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus on the lab error rate – the very data courts often don’t allow attorneys to present! P37

Does the best team always win the World Series?

If one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of it matches, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7 game series 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could be expected to beat its opponent on average 2/3 of the time, the inferior team will still win a 7 game series about 20% of the time. In the lopsided 2/3 probability case, you’d have to play a series of 23 games to determine the winner with statistical significance, meaning that the weaker team has less than a 5% chance of winning the series. In the 55% probability, a tedious 269 games would be warranted. P71

Isn’t this a reality TV game show?

Everyone who plays pays a dollar. One will win a fortune, and one will be put to death in a violent manner. Would anyone play this game? Is this from ancient Rome? No, it’s called the California Lottery… Applying highway statistics, many millions of contestants drive to and from their local ticket vendors to purchase tickets, and a reasonable estimate is that 1 of them will die in an accident per game. P78

Would you believe it?

A faithful husband, with a great job, and charming daughter, one day discovers that he is missing something in his life. One night as he returns home he spots a beautiful woman gazing with a pensive expression out the window of a dance studio. Each night as his train passes her studio, he falls further under her spell. Finally, one evening, he impulsively rushes off the train, and signs up for dance lessons, hoping to meet the woman. He finds that his haunting attraction withers once his gaze from afar gives way to face to face encounters. He does fall in love, however, not with her but with dancing. He keeps this new obsession from his wife and colleagues. Eventually his wife discovers he’s not working late. She figures the chances of his lying about after work activities is far greater if he’s having an affair than if he isn’t, so she concludes he is. But the wife is mistaken not just in her conclusion, but in her reasoning: she confused the probability that her husband would sneak around IF he were having an affair with the probability that he is having an affair IF he was sneaking around. P107

This makes no sense whatsoever until you read it

What is the probability of a family having 2 daughters if you are told that one of the children is a girl? It’s 1/3 because this additional fact eliminates the possibility of the family having 2 boys, so the only remaining combinations are (girl, boy), (boy, girl), and (girl, girl). So (g,g) is 1 out of 3. Simple really. Now, what is the probability if I tell you instead that the family has a daughter named Florida? Would you believe it improves to 1 in 2? Take a seat, this is complicated. First, there’s only a 1 in a million chance that a family has girl named Florida. And thus you can assume that the family will not name 2 daughters Florida. So now the combinations become (boy, girl named Florida – girl F), (boy, girl-NotF), (girl-NotF, girl-F), (girl-F, girl-NF). Of these 4 possible combinations, 2 have 2 girls, or 50%. P113

Don’t freak out – yet.

If you take an HIV test with 1 in 1000 false positive rate, and you come out positive, is it time to panic because the chances are 999 out of 1000 that you’ll be dead from this disease? Not quite yet… Assume that only 1 in 10,000 heterosexual, non IV drug using males is infected in the general population, and a false negative rate of 0 (that means if you do have HIV the test doesn’t miss it). This means that 1 in 10,000 will test positive. And in addition, since the false positive rate is 10x higher, there are 10 others who are not infected who will test positive as well. So now you’ll have 11 positives of which 10 are false. So the chances are really only about 9% not 99.9%. Make sure to demand a 2^nd test to confirm. P116

Urine testing for performance enhancing drugs for Olympic athletes has a 1% false positive rate. This probably makes many people comfortable that an athletes chance of guilt is 99%, but as we have seen that is not true. Suppose you test 1000 athletes. 1 in 10 is guily (doing the drug), and the guilty had a 50/50 chance of the drug being revealed in the test. Then for every 1000 athletes, 100 are cheating, the test would find 50 of them. Meanwhile, the other 900 who are not cheating, 9 of them will be found positive falsely. So the chance of guilt is not 99% but only 50/59=84.7%. p118

The nose knows not

Hold a chunk of horseradish under your nose, and you’d probably not mistake it for a clove of garlic or the inside of your sneaker. But if you sniff clear liquids, all bets are off. In the absence of context, there’s good chance you’d mix up the scents. At least that’s what happened when researchers presented experts a series of 16 random odors: the experts misidentified about 1 out of 4 scents. P133

Another reason to stick with beer
Given all these reasons for skepticism regarding wine experts discrimination, one method to test an expert is the wine triangle; each expert is given 3 wines, 2 of which are identical. The mission is for them to choose the odd one out. In a 1990 study, the experts could do this only 2/3 of the time. P133

A 1000 fallen 9/11 victims whom we’ve not recognized

After 9/11/01, when travelers were afraid to take airplanes, their fear translated into about 1000 more highway fatalities. The hidden casualties from the 9/11 attack. P159

Researchers concluded: “That people have a very poor conception of randomness; they don’t recognize it when they see it and they can’t produce when they try.” And we routinely misjudge the role of chance in our lives and make decisions that are demonstrably misaligned with our own best interests. P174

Since there’s no difference, why have one?

A Columbia/Harvard study of large corporations whose bylaws made them vulnerable to shareholders’ demands that they respond to rough periods by changing management. They found on avg that in 3 years after firing there was no improvement in operating performance. No matter what the difference in CEOs ability, they were swamped by the effect of the uncontrollable elements of the system. P188

How to avoid confirmation bias

The human brain evolved to be very efficient at pattern recognition, but the as the confirmation bias show, we are focused on finding and confirming patterns rather than minimizing our false conclusions… We should spend as much time looking for evidence that we are wrong as we spend on searching for reasons that we are correct. P191

Get out there, and get lucky

In the real world, if several similar sized firms entered a market, small fortuitous events – unexpected orders, chance meetings with buyers, managerial whims – would help determine which one received early sales and over time, which came to dominate. Economic activity by individual transactions that are too small to forsee, and these small random events could accumulate and become magnified by positive feedback over time. P204

There are many high quality but unknown books, singers, actors, and what makes one or another come to stand out is largely a conspiracy of random and minor factors – that is luck. In this view, traditional media executives and talent hunters are just spinning their wheels. And thanks to the internet this has been tested… Participants were divided into 8 separate ‘worlds’ and could only see the data on music downloads of the people in their own world. All artists in all 8 worlds began with 0 downloads… If the deterministic view is true, the same songs ought to have dominated in each of the 8 worlds, and popularity rankings in those worlds ought to have agreed with the intrinsic quality as determined by the isolated individuals. But researchers found exactly the opposite: the popularity of individual songs varied widely among the different worlds, and different songs of similar intrinsic quality also varied widely in their popularity. P206

Maybe the editors knew something that the prize committee didn’t?

The Times of London conducted an experiment. Its editors submitted typewritten manuscripts of the opening chapters of 2 novels that had won the booker prize to 20 major publishers. The submissions were made as if they were the work of aspiring authors, and none of the publishers appeared to recognize them. How did they fare? All but one of the replies were rejections. P215

** Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:57:00 +0000

Completing the recent trilogy on choice, decision and selection, Buyology reveals why we choose to purchase the things we do, even when we say we don’t like or if the product harms us (think fast food, cigarettes, alcohol). Using brain research, we learn what’s really going on inside that thick skull of our when were in our true habitat; the shopping mall. Did you buy any of that description?

And you thought smoking was a disgusting habit?

Nothing comes close to the cigarette warnings from Canada, Thailand, Australia and Brazil. They’re gorely forensically true to life, showing full color images of lung tumors, gangrenous feet and toes, open sores, mouth and throat cancers. You’d think that these graphic images would stop most smokers in their tracks… They don’t, in fact, they actually have no effect or increase smoking in smokers. [More later] p9

When 6 out of 10 doctors do it, it’s got to be good for you, right?

1.4 billion people use tobacco products today, including 1/3 of all adult males. In China, 60% of all male doctors smoke. P10

Baby face

As subject gazed as images of Mini Coopers, a discrete region in the brain that responds to faces came alive… The Mini Cooper registered in subjects brains as an adorable face. This explains its appeal. P32

Within 1/7 of a second upon viewing a facial picture, a spike in activity occurred in an area linked to the detection of rewarding stimuli. In other words, brains seemed to identify infant’s faces as somehow special. P32

6 years down the drain

By the time we reach 66, most of us will have seen 2 million TV commercials. Time wise, that’s the equivalent of watching ads for 8 hours straight 7 days a week for 6 years. P37

Location, Location, Location

Cokes product placement in American Idol had not only increased response to subjects memories for their brand, but actually had inhibited the recall of the unbranded logos. In other words, subject’s memories for the branded logos, like Coke and Cingular, had crowded out memories of the unbranded ones, such Pepsi and Verizon. P49

Results revealed that we have no memory of brands that don’t play an integral part of the storyline of a program. They become white noise, easily, instantaneously forgotten. P50

Products that play an integral part in the narrative of a program – like Coke – are not only more memorable, they even appear to have a double barreled effect. They increase our memory of the product, and weaken our ability to remember the other brands. P51

It’s called karma

Pain related neurons in both male and female brains lit up in empathy when noncheaters (in a game) experience a shock. But when cheaters were shocked, the male subjects’ brains not only showed less empathy, their reward centers actually lit up. P57

When a woman views a shapely mannequin or model who looks great – slim, sexy, confident, relaxed and appealing – subconsciously she thinks I could look like that too if I just bought that outfit… This is because of your mirror neurons – that help us tune into one another’s feelings and responses – so we can experience what it’s like to walk in another person’s shoes (or outfit). P59

Cool is in the genes

Scientists have found an area in the brain that is activated when we see products we think are ‘cool’, and this area is associated with self perception and social emotions… So that slinky Prada dress or shiny new Ferrari might be just what we need to attract a mate who could possibly end up carrying on our genetic line or providing for us for life. P64

Are you strong enough to resist Abercrombie and Fitch?

Abercrombie and Fitch positions large blow up posters of half naked models just inside their doors. Not only that, they hire actual models, attired in A&F clothes, to hang out in front of the store in groups… Let’s say you’re a socially uncertain 14 year old. As you pass the store, your mirror neurons fire up. You can imagine yourself among them: popular, desired, at the center of it all… You can’t help it, you go into the store. The place is designed like a dark, noisy nightclub, and the people working there are just as sinuous as the models – and they offer to help YOU… You inhale the characteristic A&F fragrance – and before you’ve even tried on a single item, your brain is sold. P65

Subliminal works better for taboo

When researchers imaged the brains of smokers by showing them logos of cigarettes, and subliminal images associated with smoking without having cigarettes or brands present (to comply with advertising prohibitions against cigarettes), they found more activity in reward and craving centers when subjects viewed the subliminal images than the overt images… One reason for the stronger response to subliminal imagery, is that the smokers weren’t consciously aware that they were viewing advertising, and as a result they let their guard down… Tobacco companies have succeeded in bypassing gov’t regulations by creating stimuli powerful enough to replace traditional advertising. P84

What are the least powerful ads in prompting you to smoke? Ad without warning disclaimers. Followed by ads with warnings disclaimers. More powerful still was the subliminal imagery, particularly the association with formula 1/NASCAR racing. P86

Ancient Mexican ritual revealed

The Corona with lime ritual was invented on a whim by a Chicago bartender in 1981 who popped a lime wedge into the beer on a random bet during a slow night. P89

Painting by the numbers; how to raise a family

In families with predictable routines, children had fewer respiratory illnesses, better overall health, and they performed better in elementary school. Rituals have a greater effect on emotional health, and that in families with strong rituals adolescents ‘reported a stronger sense of self, couples reported happier marriages, and children had greater interaction with their grandparents.’ P92

Oh, I’m not superstitious

On Friday 13^th in 2007, the number of car accidents shot up 51% in London, and 32% in Germany – most likely due to drivers’ heightened anxiety about unlucky date. P95

In California, heart attacks among Chinese descendants spiked 13% on the 4^th day of every month. In China, the unluckiest number is 4 since it sounds like death in Mandarin. P96

The new religion

Researchers discovered that when people viewed images associated with strong brands – iPod, Ferrari, Coke – their brains registered the exact same patterns of activity as they did when they viewed religious images. P125

The new gods

Sports imagery didn’t elicit quite as strong an emotional response as strong or weak brands. However exposure to sports stars did activate the part of our brains associated with our sense of reward in way similar to religious icons... This makes intuitive sense. When we’re thinking about whether or not to buy a new dress, a TV, a camera, our brains summon up all kinds of info about the product – and make decision accordingly. When it comes to sports, there’s little fact finding; we root for the team we like because we just do. We believe in the religion we like, because we just do. P125

½ of what you buy you don’t set out to

Researchers have found that over 50% of all purchasing decisions are made spontaneously – and therefore unconsciously – at the point of sale. P130

So if they don’t work, why do they exist?

During a virtual stroll of Paris while wearing a brainscanners, volunteers viewed ads on billboards, bus stops, sides of buses to see which best got their attention. The results: none of them. All of the visual stimulation resulted in only glazed eyes, not higher sales. P142

Smellyvision; coming soon to Fox

Odor activates many of the same regions as does sight. If short, if you smell a doughnut, you’re likely to picture it in your mind… How can smell activate some of the same areas of the brain as vision? Chalk it up to mirror neurons. Thanks to these neurons, sound can evoke equally powerful visual images. P145

Soft as a baby’s bottom

What would you guess as the most recognized and best liked fragrances in the world? Chocolate? Lilac? Money? Try J&J baby powder…Chances are good that primal childhood associations will be registered in your memory from this odor. P146

Vanilla smells like what?

Some companies use the scent of vanilla to evoke childhood because it is a scent found in breast milk. Why do you think Coke chose to roll out Vanilla Coke? In fact, the scent of vanilla is so appealing, that when it was sprayed in a clothing store near Seattle, sales of women’s clothing doubled. P147

They should call it a fakery

Some supermarkets don’t even bother having a real bakery to lure shoppers into buying more. They just pump artificial fresh baked smell straight into the store aisles from ceiling vents. P149

Dead weight

I gave 100 consumers 2 Bang & Olufusen remote controls, one with aluminum inside and the other without. The immediate reaction to the lighter weight remote? “It’s broken”… Even they found out the lightweight one was completely functional, they felt its quality was inferior. P152

Beauty is skin deep; but it sells

Women choosing mayo jars were given a choice between a pear shaped container and a container that had a narrow middle. All diet conscious females choose the latter without even tasting the stuff. Why? The shape of the bottle was associated with an image of their own bodies, and what they want. P156

Don’t believe the mouth

SST brain scans showed that although subjects rated the unaired pilot of Quizmania as the show they were least likely to watch, viewer’s brains were actually more engaged than when watching the Swan, a show they had claimed to liked (and a show that flopped in reality). P175

More companies will be trading in their pencils for SST caps. Traditional market research – questionnaires, surveys, focus groups – will gradually take on a smaller role, and neuro marketing will become the primary tool. P176

If sex sells, what exactly does it sell? More sex it seems.

Subjects who were shown the sexually suggestive ads were no better able to recall the names of the brands and products they had seen than the subjects who viewed the unerotic ads… What’s more, the group that watched a sexually charged show, had worse recall of the ads – it seemed that their memory of the explicit commercials had been eclipsed by the sexual content in the show itself. The researchers concluded ‘that sex does not sell anything other than sex itself.’ P181

But they did remember the size of her bodacious, firm, shapely, round…

Men spent inordinate amount of time passing their mousse over the woman’s breasts. But in doing so, they largely bypassed the brand name, logo, and other text. The sexual material blinded them to all the other info… In fact, only 9.8% of the men were able to remember the correct brand, compared to almost 20% of men who viewed non-sexual ads. For women – only 10.85% remembered correctly for sexual ads, vs. 22.3% for non-sexual. P182

Love really does conquer all; including sex

The more provocative and sexual the women rated the model’s expression and attire, the more bored or disinterested the women were by the ad. The more wholesome, natural, and unmade up, and clothed the model was, the more positive thee women’s reactions. Nearly twice as many people (53% vs 26%) were more likely to buy the product if it showed images of love rather than sex. P187

The plain truth

Why do we respond more favorably to real or ordinary people? It’s tied to our desire for authenticity. When we see supermodels, we intrinsically feel that whatever they claim about the product is phony. P189

** Nudge by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:20:00 +0000

Yes, we have free will, but often we don’t know what to do with it, and worse sometimes our choices work against us. The science ‘choice architecture’ is what this book is about. By pruning, presenting, and ordering choices in particular ways, we can maintain free will, but also avoid making more harmful choices. Read on, if you choose to ;)

Target practice

At Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, authorities have etched the image of a housefly into each urinal. It seems that mean don’t pay much attention to their aim, but if they see a target, attention and therefore accuracy are much increased. The etching has reduced ‘spillage’ by 80%. P4

It is a false assumption that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest… It seems reasonable that people make good choices in contexts in which they have experience, good information, and prompt feedback. The do less well in contexts in which they are inexperienced and poorly informed, and in which feedback is slow or infrequent. P9

History lesson via area code

Take the last 3 digits of your phone number and add 200. Write it down. Now, guess what year Attila the Hun sacked Europe? Was it before or after the year you wrote down? And what does this have to do with your phone number? When your phone number is a high 3 digit number, it drags the guesses upward, such that most answers are 300 years later than those with low numbers. P23

Vivid and easily imagined causes of death (eg. earthquakes) often receive inflated estimates of probability, and less vivid causes (eg. asthma) receive low estimates, even if they occur with far greater frequency. So too, recent events have a greater impact on our behavior, and our fears, than earlier ones. P25

How increase fear and confidence in others

A good way to increase people’s fear of a bad outcome is to remind them of a related incident in which things went wrong; a good way to increase their confidence is to remind them of similar situation in which everything worked out for the best. P26

The hot hand is just hot air

Most sports fans think that a player is more likely to make his next shot if he’s made his last shot, or even better, his last few shots (hot hand)… Turns out that the ‘hot hand’ is just a myth. Players who have made their last few shots are no more likely to make their next shot, actually a bit less likely. Really… Before announcers spoke of a player’s ‘hotness’, the players had made 80.5% percent of their 3 previous shots. After the ‘hotness’ pronouncement, players made only 55.5% - not significantly better than their overall shooting of 53.9%. P30

We’re all better than average

Less than 5% MBA students expect to be below the median (50^th percentile), and more than half expect to be in the 20^th percentile or higher… 90% of all drivers think they are above average. And nearly everyone thinks he has an above average sense of humor… 94% of professors think that they are better than the average professor. P32

Till death do we part

We all know that 50% of marriages end in divorce. But at the time of ceremony, almost all couples believe that there’s approximately 0% chance that their marriage will end in divorce – even those that have already been divorced! P32 2^nd marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. – Samuel Johnson

People have been shown to have an accurate sense of the likelihood that other people will get divorced (50%)… But, nearly 100% believe that they are almost certain not to get divorced! P224

It is in these circumstances that people are immensely reluctant to make prenuptial agreements. Believing divorce is unlikely, and fearing that such agreements will spoil the mood, most people take their chances with divorce law, which is (not to put too fine a point on it) is a mess, often unintelligible even to specialists in the field. P224

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive feature of human life (could it be an evolutionary adaptation to encourage us to keep going and trying despite the odds? – Ben) When we overestimate our immunity from harm, we fail to take sensible precautions. P33

Why we’re couch potatoes

Loss aversion helps to produce inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick to your current holdings. You’re reluctant to give up what you have something, because you don’t want to incur losses, so you turn down trades you otherwise would’ve made if you weren’t so rich. P34

401 Forget

Most 401k investors don’t update their allocations. Over the course of their careers, more than ½ made exactly NO changes to the way their contributions were being allocated. In fact, many married participants who were single when they joined, still have their mother/father listed as their beneficiary. P35

Can we really be that lazy?

The cause of status quo bias is a lack of attention… Network executives spend a lot of time worrying about scheduling because they know that many viewers who start with NBC, tend to stay there, despite the low cost of channel surfing…. Magazines know that autorenewal with a cancellation via phone call leads most of us to keep subscribing, because we never get around to making that call. P35

And you call yourself a doctor?

When doctors are told that 90 out of 100 patients survive, they are more likely to recommend an operation than if told that 10 out of 100 die. P36

Free is its own reward it seems

In an experiment, ½ of the moviegoers received a big bucket of free ultra stale (Styrofoam like) popcorn and the other ½ got a medium bucket. On average, the recipients of the big bucket ate 53% more – even though they didn’t like it… When asked after the movie if they may have eaten more because of the size of their bucket, most denied the possibility saying ‘Things like that don’t trick me’. They were wrong. P43

In another experiment, patrons were offered a free bowl of soup, whose bottom connected to a machine designed to refill the bowl slowly. No matter how much soup the subjects ate, the bowl never emptied. Many people kept eating, until the mercifully the experiment was ended. P44

If you want to lose weight, get smaller plates, but little packages, and don’t keep tempting things in the house. P44

Make it hurt if you want to keep it off

Wanna lose more weight – and keep it off? Make a pact with someone. Each of you should agree to lose 20, 30, or whatever you want over a period of time (6 mos, 1 year). If either fails, they have to pay $10,000. Next, on 1 day’s notice, either one could call for a weigh in. If either was found to be over the target weight, he would have to pay the other an agreed to sum. In four years, 2 grad students played this game – only once did in 4 years did either one go over the target. P47

Gambling with other peoples money is always more fun

People are more willing to gamble money that they consider ‘house’ money. This same mentality affects investors, who are willing to take big changes with their ‘winnings’… Similarly people are more likely to splurge impulsively on a big luxury when they receive an unexpected windfall, even if they had savings fully available to be spent for just such an item. P51

Yes, we’re twins

Two who live together for a long time, start to look alike. This bit of folk wisdom turns out to be true! This is partly because of shared diets and eating habits – but much of the effect is simple imitation of facial expressions. In fact, couples who end up looking alike also tend to be happier. P54

You are who you hang out with

For a quick glance at the power of social nudges consider the following:

Teenage girls who see other teenagers having children are far more likely to get pregnant.
If you’re best friends get fat, your risk of gaining weight goes up
Academic effort is influenced by your peers, so much so that random assignments of 1^st year students to a dorm or to specific roommates can have big consequences for their grades and future prospects. Parents should worry more about which roommate not which college their child gets.
Judges on panels are affected by the votes of their colleagues. A Republican appointee shows liberal patterns when seated with 2 Democratic appointees, and vice versa for a democrat seated with 2 republicans.

Why is this so? One reason is that we like to conform. P55

No one really cares about you

People are paying less attention to you than you believe. If you have a stain on your shirt, don’t worry, they probably won’t notice. But in part because people do think that everyone has their eyes on them, they conform to what other people expect. P62

Women often eat less on dates, and men eat more, apparently with the belief that women are impressed by a lot of manly eating (note to men: they aren’t). p64

The power of suggestion

If you ask people the day before an election if they intend to vote, you can increase the turnout by 25%... A study of more than 40,000 people asked a simple question: Do you intend to buy a new car in the next 6 mos? The very question increased purchase rates by 35%... If people are asked how often they expect to floss their teeth in the next week, they floss more. If people are asked whether they intend to consume fatty foods in the next week, they consume less. P70

Consider a large octagonal sign that said GO. P82

Rule 1

When choice is complicated and difficult, people might greatly appreciate a sensible default. P87

Rule 2

Required choosing is generally more appropriate for simple yes/no decisions than for more complex choices… When choices are highly complex, required choosing may not be a good idea; it might not even be feasible. P87

Rule 3

Humans make mistakes. A well designed system expects its users to err and is as forgiving as possible. P87

One study found that human error (not equipment failure) caused 82% of ‘critical anesthesia incidents’... This problem was solved by designed equipment so that the gas nozzles and connectors were different for each drug. It became physically impossible to hook up the wrong drug to the wrong port. P89

Rule 4

To think about incentives is to ask 4 questions:

Who uses? Who chooses? Who pays? Who profits? P97

Give NUDGEs

iNcentives, Understand mappings, Defaults, Give feedback, Expect errors, Structure complex choices. P100

Those that can’t, teach

A large employer, having offered is employees the chance to switch retirement plans, provided a free financial education program. They also measured the effectiveness of this education by administering a before/after test of financial literacy, using a true/false format, so random answers would on avg receive 50%. Before education the avg score was 54%; after education, the avg crept up to 55%. Teaching is hard! P112

Smart Mortgage

Research finds that mortgage customers who get the best deals – by a lot! – are those who pay no fees up front… The likely explanation for this result is that when the fee is zero, it is simpler for borrowers to compare terms, because the interest rate is the only thing they have to look at. P138

If you’re not a white male, buy your next car on line

Women and blacks pay the same as white males when buying a car online, but at the dealership they pay more, even after you account for other factors, such as income. P138

Using Fed Reserve data, American households may have an avg credit card debt of $12,000. At 18% interest rates, that translates into more than $2000 in annual interest. P142

People are willing to pay almost twice as much for the same item when paying via credit card as opposed to cash. P143

Sublime

So do we embrace subliminal advertising? What if is as long as it is in the interest of desirable ends? What limits should be placed on private or public manipulation as such?... Compare subliminal ads to something just as cunning. If you want to lose weight, one effective strategy is to put mirrors in the cafeteria. When people see themselves, they may eat less if they are chubby. Is this OK? And if mirrors are acceptable, what about mirrors that are intentionally unflattering? And if so, what about a flattering mirror at a fast food restaurant? P244

*** How we decide by Jonah Lehrer

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:55:00 +0000

You'll be surprised to discover that many of your decisions come from your subconscious - and that's a good thing. Because if you had to consciously decide about everything, you'd probably never do it in time, and you may end up getting something you'll be unhappy with. In fact, what the book stresses is that in complex areas where you are expert or highly experienced, you should trust your gut (emotions) - not your conscious brain. In areas where you are not expert, or where the decision criteria are not complex, go with the higher brain, and discount the emotions. I hope you decide to read this posting ;)

Think Fast Batter

A typical major league fast ball takes .35s (350ms) to travel the pitcher’s hand to home plate. Unfortunately for the batter, it takes .25s (250ms)for his muscles to initiate a swing. It takes a few milliseconds for the visual info to travel from the retina to the visual cortex, so batter has only about 5ms to perceive the pitch and decide to swing. But people can’t think that fast, even under perfect conditions. It takes the brain 20ms to respond to sensory stimulus. So how does the batter mange to hit a fastball? The answer is that his brain subconsciously picks up data about the pitch long before the ball leave’s the pitcher’s hand. P25

Motion Sickness is about error correction

Motion sickness is largely the result of a dopamine prediction error; there is a conflict between the type of motion being experienced – the rocking of a boat – and the type of motion expected – unmoving ground. The result in this case is nausea and vomiting. [I’ve heard that the brain suspects food poisoning for this mismatch and hence the nausea. –Ben] It doesn’t take long before the dopamine neurons start to revise their models of motion; this is why seasickness is usually temporary. After a few horrible hours, the dopamine neurons fix their predictions learns to expect the rocking. P42 And then when you get back to shore, you can become landsick too.

When the dopamine neurons are working properly, they are a crucial source of wisdom. The emotional brain effortlessly figures out what’s going on and how to exploit the situation for maximum gain. P42

The brain’s cells measure the mismatch between expectation and outcome. They use the inevitable errors to improve performance; failure is eventually turned into success. P46

Here is an experiment that highlights that the subconscious emotional brain is able to learn before the conscious logical brain.

On average people had to turn over 50 cards before they figured out the pattern to earn more money. But it took 30 cards beyond the 50 – 60% more – before the average person could explain why this pattern worked... What scientists found was that after only 10 cards, a player’s hand got nervous when it reached for negative decks… The emotions had developed an accurate sense of fear… The experiment was repeated with injured patients whose brains were damaged and thus had no emotional response. They never developed the symptoms of nervousness – and they also never figured out the pattern. When the mind is denied the emotional sting of losing, it never figures out how to win. P47

Dopamine neurons automatically detect the subtle patterns that we would otherwise fail to consciously notice; they assimilate all the data that we can’t consciously comprehend. P48

Your gut feelings explained.

Even when we consciously think we know nothing, our brains may know something if we get vague sensations of unease or pleasure. P48

The most effective way to get better is to focus on your mistakes. You need to consciously consider the errors being internalized by your dopamine neurons. P51

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” – Niels Bohr, physicist

Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process. P54 Many studies now state that it takes about 10,000 hours to become a world class expert in a particular field. At 20 hours a week, that is 10 years of practice.

Why gambling is addictive

13% of patients taking dopamine boosting drugs develop severe gambling compulsions… Why does an excess of dopamine make games of chance so irresistible? The answer reveals a serious flaw in the human brain… Think about a slot machine from the perspective of your dopamine neurons. The purpose of these cells is to predict future events… While putting quarter after quarter into the slot, your dopamine neurons are struggling to decipher the patterns in the machine (which is fruitless since there is not pattern)… But here’s the catch; while dopamine neurons are excited by predictable rewards – they increase their firing when surprised with a reward. Such unpredictable rewards are 3 to 4 more exciting… The purpose of this reward is to make the brain pay more attention to new and important stimuli. P60

Why do we believe in streaky shooters/hitters/scorers,etc.? Our dopamine neurons are to blame… The danger of random processes is that they take advantage of a defect built into the emotional brain. The dopamine neurons get such a thrill from watching a prediction come through that our brains completely misinterpret what’s actually going on. We trust our feelings and perceive patterns, but the patterns don’t actually exist. P65 Would you enter in the last winning lottery number for the next upcoming event? Why not? It has the same chance as any other combo, but most people won’t. This is a flaw of your dopamine system. You’d feel compelled that the system is due to pick a new number. But all sequences are equal.

Harry Markowitz, the Nobel prize winning economist, who invented portfolio diversification theory, couldn’t bring himself to use his own equations. When he divided up his investment portfolio, he ignored the investment advice that had won him the Nobel, and split his portfolio equally between stocks and bonds. P78

Loss aversion causes bad investment decisions. Even hypothetical losses. Say you sell a stock that then goes up 50%. You will perceive that as a loss, even if you nominally profited… This will lead you to chase and invest after a run up, when the risks are now favoring a pullback. This is what inflates and eventually bursts a bubble. Hypothetical losses, compel folks to join the party and profit.

Loss aversion is innate flaw. Everyone who experiences emotion is vulnerable to its effects. Its part of a larger phenomenon known as negativity bias, which means that bad is stronger than good. In marital interactions, it takes 5 kind comments to compensate for 1 critical comment… Investment losses hurt twice as bad as a gain pleases. P81

Want to save more? Only spend your cash

Brain imaging suggest that paying with credit card actually reduces activity in the insula, a region associated with negativity… Spending money with a credit card doesn’t feel bad, so you spend more… In experiments, the average credit card bid on auction items is twice as high as a cash bid. P85

Subjects in an MRI were offered a small gift certificate now, or a larger one in 2 to 4 weeks… These 2 options activated very different neural systems… The future gift activated the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with rational planning… But when a subject thought about getting the immediate option, the emotional/dopamine driven brain was turned on. P88

Patients with damaged pre-frontal cortexs can’t hold back their emotions. If they get angry, then they’ll just get in a fight. Even if they know it’s a bad idea – the cognitive knowledge is still there – but that knowledge is less important than what they’re feeling. P104

Would rather buy meat that is 85% lean, or 15% fat? Would rather opt for surgery with an 80% survival rate, or a 20% chance of death? Twice as many favor the former over the latter, but they are equal. Why the difference?... When a person thinks about losing something, the amygdala is automatically activated, generating negative feelings. That’s why people hate losses so much. P106

The scientists were intrigued by the subjects who weren’t swayed by the different frames (85% lean/15% fat, 80% survival/20%death)… They discovered that the amygdalas of these rational people was still just as active… It was the activity of the prefrontal cortex that best predicted decision of the subjects… People who are rational don’t perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better… If the amygdale is simply responding to a loss frame, then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain. P107 Did you read that carefully? All those folks whom you think of as cold and calculating, actually are quite emotional, and have active amygdalas causing pain and dopamine neurons causing pleasure just like everyone else. However, they are able to control their emotions with their higher brain. They feel love, hate, loss, sadness, joy just like everyone else – but they may not express it outwardly.

Seems that all you needed to learn wasn't in Kindergarden but before, when you're only 4

There was strong correlation between the behavior of the 4 year old waiting for a marshmallow and that child’s future behavior. The children who couldn’t wait a minute were much more likely to have behavioral problems later on. They got worse grades and were more likely to do drugs. They struggled in stressful situations. Their SAT scores were 210 points lower on avg than those kids who could wait a few minutes. In fact, this small test turned out to be a better predictor of SAT results than the IQ tests given to the same 4 year olds. P112

Want to get smarter? Increase your short term working memory by memorizing this passage

The brain has a special kind of memory – short term working memory – where data streaming in from all cortical areas can be manipulated and analyzed. This allows the brain to determine what info, if any, is relevant to the problem its trying to solve. Studies show that neurons in the prefrontal area will fire in response to a stimulus and then keep on firing for several seconds after the stimulus disappears. This echo allows the brain to make creative associations as seemingly unrelated sensations and ideas overlap… Numerous studies have shown strong correlations between scores on working memory and tests of general intelligence. Being able to hold more information in the prefrontal cortex, being able to hold onto that info longer, means that brain cells are better able to form useful associations. P131

Novice: Think before you do Expert: Do before you think

Novice golfers hit better shots when they consciously reflect on their actions… By paying attention to the mechanics of the stroke, the novice can avoid mistakes… When experienced golfers are forced to think about their putts, they hit significantly worse shots… When you are playing at a high level, your skills are automated. You don’t need to pay attention to every step that you’re doing. Researchers believe that this is what happens when you ‘choke’. The part of the brain that monitors behavior starts to interfere with decisions that are normally made without thinking… The worst part about choking is that it tends to be downward spiral. The failures build on one another, and a stressful situation is made more stressful. P138

Thinking too much can affect your test score. When a group of Stanford sophomores were told that a test was going to measure their intelligence, the white students scored significantly higher than the black ones… But when another group was told the same test was merely preparatory drill and not an intelligence measure, the scores were virtually identical… The discrepancy was caused by stereotype threat in the black students. They start to think ‘I should be careful, and not mess things up.’ The more you do that, the more you’ll get away from your intuitions that help you. They think they did well because they are trying so hard, but they are not. P140

A recent study found that when a person travels more than 1 hour in each direction to work, he/she has to make 40% more in order to be as satisfied with life. P145

Placebo Effect Explained

When people were told they received the pain reliever (a placebo actually), their front lobes responded by inhibiting the activity of their emotional areas that normally respond to pain. Because the people expected to experience less pain, they ended up experiencing less pain. Their predictions became a self fulfilling prophecy. P146

Let’s say you’re given the choice between chocolate cake and healthy fruit. Now let’s say before choosing you’re asked to memorize a 7 digit phone number. One group was asked to choose w/out memorizing, and another with. The 7 digit group overwhelmingly (59% to 37%) chose the cake. Why? The effort to memorize the numbers drew cognitive resources away from the part of the brain that normally controls emotional urges. Because working memory and rationality share a common cortical source – the prefrontal cortex – a mind trying to remember lots of information is less able to exert control over its impulses. P151

The brain runs on glucose, and when it runs low it explains why we get cranky when we are hungry and tired. The exhausted brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. A bad mood is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex. p152

When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed, a person can no longer make sense of the situation... In the latest clinical guidelines, doctors were strongly recommended not to obtain imaging or other diagnostic tests in patients with non-specific back pain. In too many cases, the expensive tests proved worse than useless. All of the extra detail just got in the way. The doctors performed better with less information. p164 Psychiatrists estimate that 25% of the prison population have psychopathic tendencies... whose neurological condition is best defined in terms of a specific brain malfunction: psychopaths make poor moral choices... On most psychological tests, they appear perfectly normal. Working memory isn't impaired, language is fine, they don't have reduced attention spans. They often have higher than average IQs and reasoning abilities. But they have damaged emotional brains... When normal people are shown staged videos of people receiving shocks, their hands sweat and their blood pressure surges. Psychopaths feel nothing... In the most violet types, violence actually lowers their blood pressure. The acts of violence have a calming effect... The main problem is a broken amygdala, the area responsible for propagating fear and anxiety. As a result psychopaths never feel bad when they make others feel bad... Without suffering negative emotional consequences, they never learn from their adverse experiences. They are 4 times as likely to commit crimes after being released from prison. p171 We've assumed that our normal moral decisions are the byproduct of rational thought... But this argument miss the central reality of moral decisions, which is that logic and legality have little to do with anything. p173 The evolution of morality required a whole new set of decision making machinery. The mind needed something that would keep it from hurting other people while it sought pleasure and safety... These new neuaral pathways are a very recent biological adaptation. These moral circuits can be found in only the most social primates. And we of course are the most social primates of all. p176 An assessment of US soldiers from WW2 found that only 20% actually shot at the enemy, even when under attack. It is the fear of killing, rather than the fear of being killed, that is the most common cause of battle failure... At the most vital point of battle, the soldier becomes a conscientious objector... These findings led to new training techniques and tactics which increased the rate to 55% in Korea, and to 90% in Viet Nam... Soldiers no longer felt a surge of negative emotions when they fired their weapons. They had been turned into killing machines. p180 Autism has nothing to do with psychopathy. Psychopaths can readily recognize when others are upset or in pain. Their problem is that they can't generate corresponding emotions and remain preternaturally calm. People with autism don't have a problem generating emotion. Their problem is recognition; they struggle to decipher the mental states of others. p185 The problem with facts and statisitcs is that they don't activate oru moral emotions... This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well but turn a blind eye to the millions who die every year for lack of clean water. p188 Genetics can alter brain development. But there's another way that the developing brain can be permanently damaged: child abuse... Cruelty makes us cruel. Abuse makes us abusive. Its a tragic loop. p189 In the brain of shopper a crucial part of the dopamine reward pathway is activated when we encounter something we desire. But then comes the price tag, which activates the prefrontal cortex and insula. The insula produces negative feelings like nicotine withdrawal, and seeing pictures of people in pain. We avoid things that make our insulas excited. This includes spending money. The prefrontal cortex is activated to balance these two - pleasure and pain - and to make the final purchase decision... Therefore retailers must not only excite the dopamine pathway with lures of pleasure, but also inhibit the insula. They do this by repeatedly assuring the insula by 'guaranteeing the lowest' or 'wholesale' price, offering sales or hot deals. p202 Paying with plastic literally inhibits the insula, making a person less sensitive to the cost of an item. p202 Experts and pundits often suffer from cognitive errors in that they selectively interpret the data so that it proves them right. They'll distort their thought process until it leads to the desired conclusion. p207 In an experiment, 284 people who make a living offering political and economic advice were polled on their predictions. This led to 82,361 different predictions... They tended to perfrom worse than random chance, and selected the right answer only 3.3% of the time... The most famous in the study tended to be least accurate. Why? False certainty which led the experts to mistakenly impose top down solutions. p209 The best pundits and experts are able to state their opionions in testable form so that they can continually monitor their performance. p209 Conscious deliberation over a host of options doesn't lead to the best decision! In a study, those who carefully contemplated each alternative - chose the ideal option only 25% of the time. They performed worse than random. However, when subjects were distracted for a few minutes - those who were forced to choose with their emotions - found the best option 60% of the time. p234 Following IKEA shoppers, researchers found that the longer people spent analyzing their options, the less satisfied they were with their decisions. Their rational faculties had been overwhelmed by the store and they ended up choosing the wrong couch when IKEA has over 30 choices. The shoppers did best when listening to their emotional brains. p235 Use your consciuos mind to acquire all the info you need for making your decision. But don't try to analyze the info with your conscious mind. Instead take a break while your unconscious digests it. Whatever your intution tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice. p237 As long as someone has sufficient experience in that domain - he's taken the time to train his dopamine neurons - then he shouldn't spend too much time consciously contemplating the alternatives. p237 It is the mundane math problems of daily life that require conscious thought. These won't overwhelm the prefrontal cortex, and they are so simple that they actually trip up the emotional brain, which can't compare prices or compute odds. p238 The prefrontal cortex can handle only about 4 distinct variables (maybe 5 to 9 with practice), but it can be a useful tool to evaluate simple scenarios rationally. What are best suited problems for it? Ask if the decision can be accurately summarized into numerical terms, or any domain where the details of the product aren't particularly important (then focus on price)... Important decisions about complex items, categorizing by price alone will eliminate alot of essential info. Here is where you should rely on your emotions to guide you... New problems should not rely on emotions, since those rely upon experience. You must stop and think and let your working memory tackle the dilemma. The only way out of a unique mess is to come up with a creative solution. p246 There 2 tricks to help ensure that you never let certainty interfere with your judgment. First, always entertain competing hypotheses (devil's advocate). Second, remind yourself of what you don't know. p247 Colin Powell "Tell me what you know. Then tell me what you don't know, and only then can you tell me what you think." p248 The reason emotions are so intelligent is that they've managed to turn mistakes into educational events... But there are no shortcuts to this painstaking process; becoming an expert takes time and practice. But once you've developed expertise in a particular area - it's important to trust your emotions when making decisions in that domain... And yet it doesn't mean that the emotional brain should always be trusted. Sometimes it can be impulsive and short sighted or oversensitve to patterns. But you should always be considering your emotions when weighing an important decision. p249 .04 aircraft fatalities per 1 million passenger air miles vs. .86 driving.

OK. Let's do a little math to show the truth about air travel. When the plane goes down, all passengers go down together, so lets see how many deaths happen per hour of flying vs. driving, not using this bogus passenger airmile figure.

Assume each plane can carry 220 passengers on avg, and flies at 500 mph

Assume each car carries 1.1 passengers on avg and travels at 50 mph

That means per HOUR the plane covers 220x500=110,000 passenger miles, and the car 1.1x50=55 passenger miles. This means that the plane per hour is 2000 times higher in passenger airmiles, but in terms of vehicle operation per hour, we need to multiple the fatality rate by 2000 to discover the fatalities per hour of airtravel. That figure is .04 x 2000 = 80. That figure is actually almost 100 times higher than that for an automobile per hour of driving.

* Sway: The irresistible pull of irrational behavior by Ori & Rom Brafman

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sun, 24 May 2009 01:29:00 +0000

The Brafman brothers have written a followup to the "Spider and Starfish" http://bensbookblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/starfish-and-spider-by-yuri-brafman-rod.html. If you're interested in how irrational you can be, you should study the Dan Ariely tome, Predictably Irrational http://bensbookblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/predictably-irrational-by-dan-ariely.html Otherwise this is book good for a short flight.

High culture down under

At 7:51am during rush hour at Wash DC subway plaza, a man dressed in jeans wearing a baseball cap nonchalantly took out his $3.5M Stradavarius violin… Over the next 43 minutes, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s best violinists played one of the most challenging pieces ever composed for the violin… Of the 1097 people who walked by, hardly anyone stopped. One man listened for a few minutes, a couple of kids stared, and one women who happened to recognize the violinist, gaped in disbelief. P49

But is it really intelligent to pay more?

A group of students was told the intelligence enhancing affects of SoBe Adrenaline Rush beverage. The control group was given no beverage, and the other group was further divided into 2. One group was charged $2.89 for SoBe, and the other was told that the university got a good deal and it only cost $.89 for the SoBe. How did the 3 groups perform on an intelligence test? The $2.89 group performed slightly better than the control. But before we run out and buy SoBe because of its acuity enhancing powers, we should note that the $.89 group performed significantly worse than the control. Given that the exact same beverage was given to both SoBe groups, we can only conclude that it was the value the students attributed that made the difference in their test scores…When you get something at a discount, positive expectations don’t kick in. Once we attribute a value to something, its very difficult to view it in a different light. P56

Ask her this, "Does size really matter?", when it pertains to discounts of course

The price we pay for theater tickets affects our enjoyment as well. Those who paid full price attended significantly more shows than those who received either a $2 or $7 per show discount… Those who paid full price went to more shows because their investment was higher. But there was no difference in attendance levels between the 2 discount groups. You’d expect that the $7 discount group would skip more than the $2 discount group given the lower investment. The amount of discount didn’t matter – what swayed the attendees was the very fact that a discount was given. Regardless of the size of the discount, the patrons regarded the tickets and productions as inferior. P59

Why first dates and first interviews often can lead you astray

There’s only a small correlation between open ended ‘First date’ unstructured job interviews and job performance… First impressions can be totally wrong. Applicants put on their best show, managers put on their best show – and you don’t see the realities of the person in 30 minutes. P77

We know we're all doomed in the end, but we're still optimistic about our future

College students and their friends/families were surveyed about their new romantic relationships. After a semester (6 months) had passed 61% were still in the relationship. A year later, only 48%... Roommates and parents were far better than students at predicting a relationships longevity. Students assessments on the problems in their relationships however was right on the money. The students weren’t blind to the issues that were already putting strains on the relationships; they simply ignored them when it came time to make predictions of the future. They consistently overestimated the longevity. P79

Why do people still take this stuff? And why do doctors still prescibe it?

Examining 47 randomized placebo controlled short term efficacy trials for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, researchers concluded that SSRIs were no more clinically effective than placebos in making patients – either kids or adults – feel better… When comes to SSRIs and children, only 3 out of 16 showed a positive result. And of course there are serious side effects. P96

Beauty is in the ear of the beholder

A group men was asked to speak to women without seeing them. The men were handed photos of the women, but the photos were not real. Some men were given beautiful photos… No surprise, the men evaluated the women with beautiful photos as sociable, humorous, and adept women, while the others were awkward, serious, socially inept. But the real experiment was a jury group that was only allowed to hear the women’s side of the conversation with the men without seeing the pictures. This group was able to come to the same conclusion with the voices alone. How did they do that? … Imagine if you were talking on the phone to someone you believed to be attractive. You’d be more engaged, listen more attentively, and be more immersed in the interaction. When the ‘beautiful’ women spoke to their mysterious strangers, without realizing it, they took on the character that the men expected them to have… They unconsciously picked up on the ‘beautiful’ opinion the men had of them and acted accordingly. In other words, being thought of as beautiful made the women think of themselves as beautiful and exhibit beauty in their conversations. P103

Why Russians love to lie to you if you're rich

In Russia, if people become very poor, they obviously will become a burden on society. If they became rich, it probably meant that they were up to no good: they were criminals or did things which endangered the community. This view is in direct opposition to Western attitudes towards wealth. So in Russia, on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, it is clear why Russian audiences tell contestants the wrong answer during a lifeline, while in the US the audience is right about 90% of the time. P123

What a great rule for the dinner table!

Supreme court justices have a conference rule: everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice. P153

How to cut your losses

When we find ourselves unsure about whether to continue an approach, it’s useful to ask “If I were just arriving, were given a choice of either continuing the current project, or pass on it?” If the answer is pass, then chances are you’ve been swayed to stay on because of the hidden force of commitment. Making a clean break might feel uncomfortable, but it could be in our best interest.

* Take Charge of Your Mind by John Selby

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:29:00 +0000

A short little book that can be condensed into a short little paragraph to obtain 95% of the benefit. How you say? Well it turns out that brain of yours is not able to multi-task very well at all. But this defect is really a feature if you know what do to with it. By focusing your mind on 2 sensory inputs at the same time, you can effectively overwhelm it – and block all other thoughts – including those that stress you out. And how do you focus on 2 sensory inputs. Easy, just focus on the air flowing in and out of your nose as you breath, and also focus on your stomach/chest moving in and out with each breath. That’s it! Amazing, now that you’ve found your chi or your chakra or whatever – just relax and live in the moment.

See videos on the meditative techniques: http://takechargeonline.com/

Want to get promoted? Stop being angry at work

You have a wide variety of possible mind states, each one involving a particular combination of thoughts, perceptions, memories, and imaginings. Your angry mind states are generated when you fixate on a present conflict or dwell on an unresolved past conflict. This mind state makes your body respond with aggressive tensions as your heartbeat increases and your breathing tightens. If you want to shift out of this angry mood, what can you do? You must take charge of your thoughts, shift away the memories that are provoking the angry emotion, and turn your attention in more productive directions. Especially at work, staying stuck in such a negative mood is going to damage your success as well as your health. P45

Breath in, breath out

We’ve found that the most powerful action you can take to instantly shift your focus of attention into the present moment is to say to yourself “I feel the air flowing in and out of my nose”, and allow these words to turn your attention to exactly what you’ve pointed toward – your breathing. P49

Is that why I can't rub my head and pat my stomach at the same time?

This shift in mental focus dissolves worried and angry thoughts because, as cognitive science has demonstrated, we can’t focus on thoughts about the past and the future and at the same time experience two or more sensations in the body in the present moment. P50

Pay attention to your heart. No, not the one that pumps the blood.

Most people find that when they first tune in to the feelings in their hearts, there’s not much feeling there at all… It’s definitely wise to deal with whatever numb or negative feelings you find when you say “I’m aware of the feelings in my heart.” Cognitive studies have shown that just through the act of regularly pausing and turning your mind’s attention to your heart, you stimulate a sense of relaxation, expansion and warmth, and the inflow of good feelings into your heart. When you heart feels temporarily overwhelmed with angry or cold emotions, you encourage the inflow of positive feelings by recalling the love you feel for someone in your life. As you feel warmth, acceptance and love in your heart for that person, you’ll find that your breathing deepens and you come more alive in the present moment. P53

Cognitive research has shown that your mind will quite willingly respond and do what you tell it to do – but you must first state your intent and employ a carefully selected phase that will predictably provoke the desired inner response. P63

Thinking is not doing

You must say – not necessarily out load – but using the speech center and vocal chords to vocalize. Just thinking the words, will cause almost nothing to happen. Thinking happens in the mind, but speech requires the body. Your power of intent is greatly increased when you move from thinking to speaking. P65

Proof that we can’t multitask

Studies at the NIH have shown that you can’t continue with a logical stream of thought and at the same time focus your attention on two or more sensory experiences. P68

And that’s why music calms the beast inside us

Have you wondered why listening to music transports you outside your usual thoughts and feelings? When you focus on 2 or more harmonies in music, psychologically you are in effect short circuiting your chronic thought flows, entering a state where your thoughts are quiet. P68

What!?!?! You mean I wasted 10 years in an ashram giving up all of my worldly possessions for something I could have learned in 2 just weeks? Oh shit, I’m not supposed to be upset anymore. Breath in, breath out…

Traditional meditative quiet mind techniques often take 10 years to master rather than 2 weeks. But by focusing one’s attention on 2 different sensory inputs at the same time, you can quiet your thoughts immediately. P68

Your brain responds and reacts physically to one of two primary emotions: fear or peace. When you’re afraid, tension grips the muscles of your skull and neck. Conversely when you’re at peace, your scalp muscle relax and you feel a warm sensation envelop you. P89

Its either one or the other, but never both

The brain is wired in such a way that we can’t simultaneously be busy judging and feel compassion. They are incompatible. Furthermore, we can’t enjoy sensory pleasures until we take a break from judging. Judging also separates us from what we’re experiencing. When we judge, we hold back and don’t commit. Judgment after all is rooted in the fear function of the mind. We are apprehensive and suspect that something bad might happen if we arent’ constantly careful. So letting go of judgment is another way of letting go of anxiety. P110

It must be quiet before the storm

What we do know from brain scan research is that we tend to use a limited portion of our mind when deductively thinking, but when we become momentarily quiet and then have flashes of insight pop into our mind, a much large portion of the brain is being used, including the right brain. P146

What makes us wise

Wise individuals tend to be grounded in their own bodies, tuned into the present. They are less fearful, by having learned to release anxiety and worries. They are not judgmental, but feel compassion. They are open to receive new information and ideas. And they know how and when to act – and not to act. P164

The half full crowd has got it going on

There is strong evidence that optimistic people are more successful and healthier. Optimistic insurance agents in the top 25% of an optimistic psychology test sold twice as much as those in the bottom 25%, who were also twice as likely to resign… A Harvard study of 1300 men revealed that men who labeled themselves as optimistic had ½ the incidence of heart disease of those that didn’t. p236

Believe in yourself

Perceived self efficacy refers to the beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments. And research has shown that individuals who are high in self efficacy achieve higher levels of job satisfaction and performance. And high self efficacy is correlated to stress reduction. P240

* SuperCrunchers by Ian Ayres

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:03:00 +0000

Everything you do, write, purchase, and say is going to get recorded, and stored in databases. That is the way of the future. This information is going to be used to figure you out. What you want, what you’ve done, and what you may do. And when you combine these data from thousands of people, other patterns of social dynamics are revealed. Ah, the wheels of progress just keep rolling on. Please try not to get run over…

Who needs experts when we’ve got the raw data?

Experts were ordained because of their decades of individual trial and error experience. We could trust that they knew the best way to do things… Now something is changing, as govts and businesses rely on huge databases to guide their decisions… What’s supercrunching? It is statistical analysis that impacts real world decisions by bringing together really big datasets, fast processing with large scale social implications. P10

Data based decision making is coming up with things like this:

Rental car companies are refusing service to people with poor credit because the data correlates low credit scores with higher accident rates. Airlines will skip over frequent fliers (who are more loyal) and give the next open seat to data identified customer who is most at risk of not coming back. The No Child Left Behind act uses methods supported by rigorous data analysis, is causing teachers to spend 45% of class time training kids to pass the test. It is even shifting some teachers toward class lessons where every word is scripted and statistically vetted – and improving test results and achievement. P12

Freeloading is a thing of a past

Instead of having more profitable customers subsidizing the less profitable, firms will be able to target rewards to their most profitable customers. In this brave new world you should be scared when a firm becomes particularly solicitous of your business. It probably means you have been paying too much! Airlines are learning to give upgrades and perks to fliers that make them the most money, not just who fly the most. P30

Its no longer safe to rely on the fact that other consumers care about price. Firms are figuring out more and more sophisticated ways to treat the price oblivious differently than the price conscious. P32

That smiling woman in the corner will cost you a pretty penny

A credit card company sent out 50,000 mailings offering random interest rates varying from 3.25% to 11.75%. Of course, the lower rates produced larger demand, but price wasn’t everything. They also randomized other aspects of the solicitations. By adding a photo of a smiling woman in the corner, the response rate of male customers was the same as lowering the interest rate 4.5%. They found an even bigger effect when they had a marketing research firm call the client a week before the mailing and simply ask ‘Are you planning to make any large purchases in the next few months?’p50

Not sure what to do? Try everything

Monster.com wanted to test 7 different web page elements… All in all, Monster had 128 page permutations. But by using the Taguchi Method, Offermatica was able to test just 8 recipe pages and still make accurate predictions about how the untested 120 other web pages would fare… By doing this employers spent 8.31% more per visit when visiting the modified, winning page vs. the original. P52

Who would have thought you needed two?

JoAnn fabrics included an unlikely promotion in their tests. Buy 2 sewing machines and get an extra 10% off. How many people need 2 sewing machines? Much to their amazement, the randomized tested promotion increased revenue per user by a whopping 209%! P54

Offermatic exec states: “I go to meeting where you have all these people sitting around claiming authority. You have the analytic guy with the amulet of historical data. You’ve got the branding guy who has this mystical certainty about what makes brands stronger. And of course you’ve got the boss who’s used to thinking that he knows best. But what’s missing is the consumer’s voice.” P55

Hey, doc can we skip the ‘Glove’ treatment?

Dozens of studies dating back to 1989 found little support for many of tests commonly included in a typical annual physical for symptomless people. Routine pelvic, rectal, and testicular exams haven’t made any difference in overall survival rates. The routine physical is largely obsolete, yet physicians insist on doing them and in very large numbers. P87

Many practicing doctors still believe:

Vitamin B12 deficiencies must be treated with injections because pills are ineffective.

Patching an eye improves comfort and healing in the case of corneal abrasions.

That giving opiate pain killers to patients with abdominal pain can mask signs of peritonitis. However, there is evidence from carefully controlled randomized trials that each of these beliefs is FALSE. P88

Don’t believe the legal experts

An incredibly simple and crude flowchart was put together to analyze 2002 supreme court term. The statistical model based upon the crude flowchart was pitted against a panel of legal experts who follow the supreme court… For every case argued in 2002, the model predicted 75% of the results correctly, while the experts only got 59.1%. The model was also better in predicting Justice O’connor’s (a notorious swing voter) results 70% of the time vs. 61% for the experts. P108

Don’t believe the purchasing experts either

A Dutch researcher collected a database of 5200 computer equipment and software purchases by more than 700 Dutch businesses. For each purchase, he had information on more than 300 aspects of the transaction. He used part of his data to analyze 14 aspects of the transaction, like size and reputation of the supplier as well as whether lawyers were involved in negotiating the contract. He then pitted his predictions against professional purchasers… The purchasing managers couldn’t outperform the statistical formula to predict timeliness of delivery, adherence to budge or purchasing satisfaction. It even out peformed above average managers as a subset. And managers reviewing transactions in their own industry didn’t fare any better. P110

Heck, don’t believe any experts!

For decades, social scientists have been comparing the predictive accuracies of super crunchers and traditional experts. In study after study, there is a strong tendency for the super crunchers to come out on top. P108

Humans are not only prone to make biased predictions, we’re also damnably overconfident about our predictions and slow to change them in the face of new evidence. P114

Imagine in the near future that every car has a flash memory drive, a mini black box recorder to tell what was happening at the time of an accident. P140 Won’t the authorities and insurance companies love that! And so will the parent’s of teenagers too!

An actual formula for success

A company called Epagogix analyzes movie scripts and uses that predict box office results. This is done before the stars and directors are chosen. What made the movie CEOs excited was that the neural equations had been able to accurately predict the profitability of 6 out of 9 films. On a number of the films, the formula’s revenue prediction was within a few million dollars of the actual gross. 6 out 9 is far from perfect until you realize that traditionally studios are only accurate on 1/3 of their predictions of gross revenues. P146

Robomovie written by robowriter

Epagogix is putting its money where its mouth is. They are planning to remake a movie that was a huge commercial disappointment. With the help of the neural network, he thinks a few simple changes to the script could generate a 23 fold increase in the gross. P149

What’s your pain point? Don't worry your favorite store knows

More and more grocery stores are calculating their customers’ pain points (the highest price you’re willing to pay). It would be scandal if we learned that they charging customers different prices for the same jar of peanut butter. However, there is nothing wrong from them setting individualized coupon amounts that they think are the minimum discount to get you to buy, printed right out at the checkout. P173

Nowhere to hide

The law in the past didn’t need to worry much about our walking around privacy, because out on the street we were usually effectively anonymous… Yet the sphere of public anonymity is shrinking. With just a name, we can google people on the fly to pull up addresses, photos, and myriad pieces of other info. It will soon be possible to passively identify passersby with face recognition software… Suddenly, if you happened to be walking by in the background when a tourist snaps a picture, the whole world could learn where you were. Any photo posted to Flickr could reveal your whereabouts. P177

Hi, is this Visa? Yes, I wanted to know if my wife and I have a future

It’s a little unnerving to think that Visa, with a little data mining of your credit card charges can make a pretty accurate guess of whether you’ll divorce in 5 years. P179

A 7 year, randomized test of 36,000 women aged 50 to 79 found that taking calcium resulted in no significant reduction in the risk of hip fracture, but an increase in kidney stones. P189

Are men really smarter? Well yes, but also much dumber.

Larry Summers, as president of Harvard, got into hot water in comparing the scientific progress of men and women. It should be noted that there is no pronounced difference in the average math or science score for male and female 12^th graders. But there is a difference in the deviation (tails) of the distribution. There are 2 men for each woman in the top 5%, because the std deviation is 20% greater for males. In the Top 1/100^th to 1^st percentile, this might mean 5 men per woman… But in suggesting a gendered difference in std deviation, is suggesting that men are more likely to be really smart, but it also implies that men are innately more likely to be really dumb. P206

This year I will... by MJ Ryan

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 03:58:00 +0000

Ever been to therapy? Has your therapist actually helped you solve your problem and made you more successful? Or was it just a bunch of talk? Well, MJ Ryan’s approach is much more focused on addressing the thing that is under your control – you – and working with you to change who you are. She is aware of the science and psychology that is out there on the subject of change, and her methods and advice try to harness these findings. The good thing about her approach is that you will either see changes in a few days, weeks and months, or you won’t. If not, move onto something else I suppose. But I imagine most folks will benefit from trying this approach for a period of time. Remember, we’re all a work in progress.

5 Stages of Change

Social scientists tell us that when we change a habit or follow a dream we go through 5 stages: precontemplation (when we don’t know that we want to change), contemplation (someday I’ll do that), preparation (I’ll get ready to do that soon), action (I’m starting do it), and maintenance (keep doing it until we get where we want). P4

The other 55% are too drunk to try!

45% of us make New Year’s resolutions, but only 8% succeed…90% of heart patients don’t stick to their lifestyle changes they need to make in order to live longer. P5

Scientists tell us that 90% of our daily lives is spent in routine… We don’t have to think about how to brush our teeth or tie our shoes or drive a car. That frees up our brain do something more interesting useful. P10 Let’s see if 90% of our waking lives is spent in routine and we are awake about 16 hours a day, that leaves about 1.6 hours for thinking. But then the avg person watches about 4 hours of TV per day. So how does that math work?

Get emotional about it

There are 3 things needed to make any change: desire, intent, and persistence… You’ll learn that the process isn’t about getting rid of bad habits, but building new, more positive ones… And because of the way your brain is wired, the most powerful thing you can do is to engage your emotional brain in a way that makes it easy, fun, and different. P6

Top 10 Resolution Pitfalls

Being vague about your wants
Not making serious commitments
Procrastinating and excuse making instead of acting
Being unwilling to go through the awkward phase
Not setting up a tracking and reminder system
Expecting perfection, falling into guilt, shame, regret
Trying to go it alone
Telling yourself self limiting rut stories
Not having backup plans
Turning slip ups to give ups

Getting Clear on what you truly want

Write every goal you’d like to accomplish in the next 20 years. Write as fast as possible.
Write beside each one the number of years it will take to reach each goal (1, 5, 10, 20)
Circle the top 4 1 year goals you want the most
Write down the things you may need to do – that you don’t want to in order to make these goals happen
Choose the goal that you are willing to do the hard things for

Nonsequitur: How to do the laundry

The scientifically proven best way to do laundry: fill the machine with water first, then soap, then clothes. P17

Anger is really a cry for help, you big fat baby!

Losing your temper is a sign that some unexpressed need is not being met, and that you are not in touch with your feelings. Trying to control your anger is treating the symptom, come to believe that it is reasonable to have wants and that it is OK to express them. The more you express your wants and needs, the less likely you are to get mad. None of us are doing what we’re doing because we’re bad. We just don’t know any other way to handle our fear, our loneliness, our need to say no. p23

Turns out you really are a big fat baby mammal

Your limbic, mammalian brain isn’t very smart. It understands pleasure, pain, safety, danger. It propels us towards pleasure and away from pain. It triggers the flight or fight response… If the change you’re trying to make seems like it is too scary, too hard or no fun, your limbic brain is going to work against it. So what you’re looking for is easy, fun, new and different. P28

Virtual reality is real after all

A few minutes a day, vividly picture the neural circuitry in your brain for the new behavior growing inside your head. Imagine new bridges being built that make it easy for you to be optimistic or eat right, or take life in stride… This envisioning uses the capacity of the mind to physiologically create the images we focus on. You can actually create new circuits by thinking strongly about them. P29

What if I just imagined winning the gold and just stayed in bed this morning? Its cold!

In a famous study of Olympic skiers, one group did their normal training, and the other didn’t ski at all. Rather they vividly imagined themselves making every run correctly. When it came time to compete, the imaginers skied better… How does this work? It turns out that if the process is vivid enough the brain doesn’t differentiate between imagining doing something and actually doing it. Either way our neurons are firing that particular sequence, making it easier to do it again. P128

We’re all dopamine junkies

When you do something new and challenging, your brain rewards you by releasing a feel good hormone dopamine. If it involves taking some kind of risk, like public speaking, you’ll also get a boost of epinephrine, another feel good chemical. So once you get into action, you’ve got chemistry on your side. P32

Cool it before you regret it

When our emotional brain feels so afraid, it wrests control of our thinking, and sends us into flight or fight. In this state we end up doing or saying all kinds of things we regret later… It takes up to 30 minutes and up to 24 hours for the stress hormones to subside and our thinking brain to reengage. P35

Don’t try to think about negative thoughts. Oh crap I just did it too!

Psychologists have discovered that trying to consciously remove a negative mental image or habit actually reinforces it. That’s because if you give yourself a command such as ‘Don’t think of donuts’, there’s actually a part of the brain is trying to obey by constantly scanning “Oh, you’re thinking about donuts now? How about having one!?”, which of course results in you constantly thinking about the very thing you’ve vowed not to. But if you create a positive image of what you want to go toward, that’s what the brain begins scanning for instead. Finding a positive motivation also engages your emotional brain to work for the change, not against it… Don’t run away from smoking, but towards a longer life. Not fear, but courage. Not loneliness, but someone special. Get it? P39

1 week after it starts is the best time to quit

A study noted that it is much easier for women to stop smoking within 10 days after the 3^rd day of their period than any other time of the month. Only 25% relapse, compared to 75% who stop at other times (proving that there must be some relationship between cravings and hormones). P46 Hmm, could this also be the best time for ladies to quit other addictions, the best time to dump a boyfriend, or to learn a new habit?

Are you being framed?

Frames are mindsets that structure how we think and how we process facts. When we are presented with facts we need to make sense of them; they have to fit into what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise the facts go in and then they go back out. Frames are stories we tell ourselves about life that confirmed over and over because we filter out any conflicting facts… Frames can be your friend or foe. Self defeating frames will lead you to repeat negative patterns. I know a woman whose mind set is that men are not to be counted on. And guess what? Her story keeps coming true. She interprets all behavior as proof that she is right. p51

Just act like it

If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves. A bit of brain science may help here. When you ask why, you’re engaging your analytical thinking left brain, which is focused on the present: the information that tells me why I am the way I am today. It is a data gathering function… But to change something or to bring something new into being, you must engage your right brain, where innovative thinking happens. The right brain is future oriented. This part doesn’t care about what you’ve done, in fact it’s energized by newness and bored by routine… In preparing for change, allow your right brain to help you. Ask ‘What’ questions rather than ‘Why’ questions. What can I do to have more balance in my life? Rather than, Why I am a workaholic? One leads to rumination and stuckness, and the other to creative possibilities and momentum. P56

Believe in yourself

The effect of self confidence on goal achievement has been highly researched – over 6000 studies since 1976. It has been found to be a significant (and often the single most significant) factor in success in relationships, work, musical performances, sports… How come? Self confidence keeps the emotional brain out of fight of flight fear. P60

Not self confident enough? Write 4 to 6 accomplishments of yours. Write down what YOU did. Write down the strengths and skills you used repeatedly to create these successes. These are your competencies that you can apply to ANY goal. P61

I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost over 300 games. On 26 occasions, I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot… and missed. And I have failed over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed – Michael Jordan

We all make mistakes, but some make the grave mistake of not admitting that.

Would be neurosurgeons were studied to determine who would succeed and who would fail. The researcher discovered that the answer came down to how they responded to the following 2 questions: Do you ever make mistakes? If so, what’s the worst you ever made? Those who flunked claimed to never make mistakes, or attributed error to things beyond their control. Successful students admitted to many mistakes, and described what they had learned about avoiding them in the future. P66

Ask yourself ‘Will doing this make me feel good or help me achieve my goal?” when confronting something negative. Then figure out ‘What response would bring me the greatest peace?’ This will allow you to let things go that normally would have upset you, and to respond in more thoughtful ways. P88

Why we ceremonialize important changes in our lives

When we declare “I’m going to do this…” and back it up with some kind of ceremony, we engage our whole brain. Stating the intention is a left brained activity; it’s logical and analytic. Expressing the intention in a ceremony engages our right brain, where images and symbols reside. With both sides activated, we’re more likely to succeed. P89

One man’s secret to happiness: he asks himself “How can I live so that tomorrow is a great day?” It helps him focus on what he truly wants, and he wakes up in a more positive frame of mind. P90

The 3 zones of existence

There are 3 zones of existence; comfort, stretch, and stress. Stretch is where change occurs. It’s where you feel awkward, but not so stressed that learning is impossible. These zones are moving targets, so remember that if what you’re doing doesn’t feel at least somewhat weird to you, you haven’t gone far enough out of the comfort zone. Getting into the stretch zone is good for you. It helps keep your brain healthy… Continuously stretching will even help us lose weight. Researchers who asked folks to do something different each day – listen to a new radio station – found that they lost and kept off weight. Scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general. P109

Can't you wait just ½ a second?

Scientists tell us that the amount time between impulse and action is a .5 second. We really don’t give it any thought. We’ve got our hand in the cookie jar, the liquor to our lips, the insult hurled at our spouse in a blink. To counteract this you must become aware of your impulses BEFORE you act on them… A recent study showed that simply by thinking about what you ate for lunch when having an impulse for an afternoon snack resulted in a 14lb weight loss… How do you become aware? You’ll absolutely need some kind of reminder from the outside. Not because you’re weak but because your habits are so strong. Use post it notes on the fridge and liquor that say “The answer is not here.”. Put a note on your steering wheel that says ‘What am I grateful for right now?’, ask a friend to email you every day asking ‘What have you done to advance your business idea today?’ Also temptation proof your environment. Get rid of junk food, credit cards, or anything that reminds of your old bad habits. This also means avoiding people and places associated with indulging. The body develops a physical response to the environments it was in when your indulged. P121

Umm, I'll choose 5?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would rate your commitment on this item?

This is a trick question. There is no ½ way on commitment. Either you are or you aren’t.

Ask yourself this question: if people were watching you, how would they know that you’re committed? P127

The 3 types of learning

There are 3 types of learning; prehoc, adhoc, and posthoc. Posthoc is most common, it is when you realize something after the fact, and how to do it differently the next time. Ad hoc, is when your realize you need to do something differently while it is happening. Prehoc, is when you’ve learned it before hand, and can use it immediately when the occasion arises. To get to prehoc, you must proceed through posthoc and adhoc learning. Thus, recognition that you’ve failed (posthoc) is a key first step in any change process requiring new learning. P132

Homeostasis; the enemy of change

Psychologists explain that the brain will accept new information only if it doesn’t jeopardize or harm the coherence the brain is trying to maintain. When we try to make changes that are too aggressive, our system tries to maintain the status quo by swinging in the opposite direction. This is why strict diets don’t work. P142

You are your worst enemy

Imagine you say that you want to find a long term relationship and have had no success. It’s not that you’re not committed to finding a relationship. It’s that you’re more committed to something else that contradicts your stated desire but that you believe protects you in some way. You may be more committed to not getting hurt than having a relationship. And beneath that commitment is an underlying assumption that is driving your behavior; for instance, if I’m alone, I’m safe; if I’m with someone I’ll get hurt. You fail to get what you think you want because you haven’t gotten to the bottom of it all. P155

Getting to your core assumptions

State your commitment
What’s keeping you from achieving this commitment?
What are you afraid would happen if you changed your behavior to prevent the items in question 2 from happening?
Are you protecting yourself by doing the things in item 2?
State what are your now revealed countercommitments
What is the core assumption behind each countercommitment. To get at it, what would be so bad if you gave up your countercommitment?

Science confirms the power of the imperfect. Studies have shown that dieters who deal constructively with a lapse are more likely to lose weight and keep it off than those who beat themselves up after a mistake. P174

Treat it all as practice

The more we practice, the better we get. So failure is a kind of practice. The average smoker quits 4 to 6 times before succeeding. But practicing only works if we stop shaming ourselves, and start paying attention to what the lapse can teach us about improving our success the next time. P174

Self Apology

Acknowledge the commitment that wasn’t kept
Describe the consequences of the breach
What was the context of the breach – without blaming
What will restore trust

Surf's up. Lets all go urge surfing!

Scientists tell us that on average cravings attack 4 to 7 times a day and last only seconds… You don’t have to act on them. They simply arrive and at some point they will disappear. The more we pay attention to the process of rising and passing, the less hooked we are by the content of the our thoughts and feelings. Addiction experts call this ‘urge surfing’… As soon as you become aware of a strong sensation, rather than ignore or indulge it, pay more attention to it… You must differentiate between thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations. “I want a coke” is a thought. Desperation is a feeling. The picture of a cold coke in your hand is the image. The sensation is the hot tingly feeling in your throat waited to be slaked. Give the sensation the kind of curious attention you would give someone you’d just met and were intrigued with. P182

Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny. – Mahatma Gandhi

12 Tips for keeping your promises

1. Make it non-negotiable

Promise that you are going to do it. Not when, how, or where – just that you will do it.

2. Make it actionable

Goals must be translated into actions and verbs. To succeed you must know what actions you’re going to take.

3. Have solutions for your usual excuses

What got in your way in the past? Forgetting, losing interest, not knowing how to begin. What rationalizations did you use when you quit in the past? It doesn’t matter, it’s not that bad, it’s too hard. Create strategies in advance to deal with these excuses.

4. Use procrastination to your advantage

60% of the population is pressure prompted, and take as long as possible before being forced into action by some external deadline. If you’re one these, create real deadlines with consequences (like losing money or face) to pressure prompt you into action.

5. Schedule it in

Put into your calendar schedule if it is important, especially early on to give it a chance of becoming a habit.

6. Do it daily

If you want to create new, good habit, then you need to do a little of it every day.

7. Monitor your behavior

Research shows that when you monitor your behavior in writing, you’re more likely to do better.

8. Focus on the horizon

Look at how far you’ve come, not how much you have left to do. Scientists call this the horizon effect. It creates encouragement and builds determination.

9. Take it one choice at a time

Our lives are constructed one moment at a time, many of which we are not fully aware of. Bring your choices to your consciousness. Ask if you are choosing the right thing at the right time for your goals. If not, choose differently. The more you focus on positive choice that you can make today, without worrying about forever in the future, the more you will live yourself into the new habit.

10. Find someone who’s doing what you want, and imitate them

Babies learn by imitation, so why not adults? Most people love to teach if given the opportunity, so don’t be afraid to tell someone that you find their habits and accomplishments worthy of tutelage.

11. Teach it someone else

A great way to cement a habit is to become a mentor (and karmically return the favor for point 10).

12. Treat yourself kindly

Treat ourselves with kindness, and don’t collapse into shame or guilt but try again with greater wisdom for having faltered.

Why we make mistakes by Joseph Hallinan

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:32:00 +0000

We are all victims of our own mistakes. We can dwell on this fact and our past errors, or you can pick up this book and discover why you are so bone headed. It seems that the root cause is that thing between your ears. It’s error prone by design. Unless you train it and stay alert, you’re going to mak misteaks, mani of them.

And you thought the English were smarter!

A few years ago in Wales, England, a mob of vigilantes attacked and vandalized the office of prominent children’s doctor. Why? Because according to the police they had confused the word ‘pediatrician’ with the word ‘pedophile’… Afterward the doctor gave an interview ‘I suppose I’m really a victim of ignorance.’ P1

Nothing like a fine glass of Dakota Cabernet

Our expectations can shape the way we see the world and often the way we act in it as well… ½ the people in a restaurant were told their complimentary glass of cabernet came from CA, the other was told it came from N. Dakota. Not only did the N Datoka group eat less of their meals, but they head for the door more quickly. P2

These effects occur largely outside of our consciousness; we’re biased – we just don’t know we’re biased. Some are so strong, that even when we know them, we find it hard to correct for them… Examining 33 studies of answer changing on standardized tests proves that on average that test takers are not hurt by changing their answers. And yet, even after students are told of these results, they still tend to stick with their 1^st answers. P3

Within 1/10 of second after looking at a scene, we are usually able to extract its meaning. The price we pay for this rapid fire analysis is that we miss a lot of details. P3

When prices are set for multiple units (4 for $1.00 instead of $.25/each), sales increase 32%. P7

At normal viewing distances, the area of clear vision is only about the size of a quarter. The eye deals with this constraint by constantly darting about, moving and stopping 3 times per second. P12

Lean left

When people are forced to make turn at an intersection, right handers prefer turning right (lefties prefer turning left too). As a result, one should look to the left when searching for the shortest lines at stores, banks, and rides. P13

Experts and novices tend to look at things in different ways… Experts maintain a longer quite eye period – the amount of time needed to accurately program motor responses that occurs between the last glimpse of a target and the 1^st twitch of our nervous system. Experts gaze at the ball much longer and rarely shift their sight. Less skilled individuals don’t stare at the ball very long, and tend to look away often. P14

Are you really paying attention?

As a stranger and a pedestrian talk as part of an experiment, they are rudely interrupted by 2 men who pass between them while carrying a door. The interruption is brief – 1 second. But during that 1 second, one of the men carrying the door switches places with the stranger. When the door is gone, he continues the conversation as if nothing had happened. Would the pedestrian notice that they are talking to someone new? The majority didn’t. Only 7 of 15 noticed! P15

Probably not

During a film, one actor was replaced by another, and the film was shown to 40 students. Only 1/3 noticed the change. P17

Maybe because you’re nearly blind

The eye has high resolution only at an angle of 2 degrees, or about the width of your thumb at arm’s length; beyond that, things get blurry. P18

When you look for things seldom seen, you seldom see it

Experimenters asked volunteers to look at 1000s images. Each image was set against a busy background filled with other images.The volunteers were asked to report whether they saw a tool, like a wrench or a hammer. When the tool was present a lot – which was true ½ the time, the volunteers did a great job of spotting it. They were wrong only 7% of the time. But when the tool was rarely present (1 out of 100 images), their error rate soared to 30%. Why? They gave up. Observers have a quitting threshold – basically, the amount of time they will look for something before giving up. Typically observers slow down after making mistakes, and speed up after successes. Since observers looking for seldom seen items can successfully say no almost all the time and be right, they tend to speed up and drive down their quitting time… In fact, they abandoned their search in less than the average time required to find the target… What if your job were to find a gun? Or a tumor? People don’t want you to quit early – they want you to stay late… Routine mammograms reveal tumors only .3% of the time. Guns are even rarer; roughly 1 in a million passengers. Both occupations have considerable error rates. Radiologists miss 30% of the tumors. In one study 90% of lung tumors were missed for months! Airport screeners have a failure rate of 25%. At LAX, the TSA found that screeners missed 75% of bomb materials. P23

Why you can’t remember names

Researchers asked real people to study the biographies of fictional people. The biographies contained names, hometown, occupation, hobbies. So what did people remember about the fake people? Jobs were remembered 69%. Hobbies 68%. Hometowns 62%. First names only 31% and last names only 30%. Why should this be? The best guess is that names, in and of themselves, don’t mean much; they’re just arbitrary labels. Jobs, hobbies, and places, are often semantically richer – they mean something. P29

Or passwords

In one test, 30% forgot the passwords after 1 week. 65% were forgotten after 3 months. P4… 80% of IT help desk calls are for forgotten passwords. P34

Or phone numbers

A poll of 3000 people found that 25% couldn’t remember their own phone numbers. P34

Nice haircut! Do I know you?

When you’re trying to figure out whether you recognize someone, what do you look for? Studies have found that that the most consistent feature is… hair. Which is an interesting choice given that hair, of all our physical features, is one of the most easily altered. But hair it is. P37

If you want to remember a person’s face, try to make a number of difficult personal judgments about his face when you’re first meeting him. P38

Misidentifying one person for another is more common than many of us would like to believe – especially regarding witness testimony. Between 1989 and 2007, 201 prisoners in the US were freed through DNA analysis. Of these 77% had been mistakenly identified by eyewitnesses. P41

The ugly face of crime

Research indicates that criminals are, by and large, uglier than the rest of us… The long term consequences of being young and ugly were small but consistent . Unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average looking. Yet pretty faces are the ones we tend to recognize. P42

That time of the month is costly it seems

Researchers found that lap dancers earnings were strongly related to their menstrual cycles. During fertile periods for women not taking the pill, they earned $335 per shift. But during menstruation, earnings plunged 45% to only $185 per shift. Moreover, this pattern was remarkably consistent: all of the dancers made less money during their menstrual periods – whether on the pill or not. Those on the pill consistently earned about $80 less per shift… How did the guys know? A recent 2008 study found that women who are at the peak time of fertility may have changes in their voice that make them sound more attractive (higher pitched). This may occur because the larynx changes it size and shape in response to hormones. P47-8

Proof that snobbishness is real

Volunteers were asked to taste 5 wines that were labeled according to price: $5, $10, $35, $45, $90 per bottle. But researchers pulled a switcheroo. The $90 wine appeared twice – once in the $90 bottle, and again in the $10 bottle. The same for the $45 wine: it appeared in the $45 and the $5 bottles. But tasters never noticed; no matter what, they preferred the wine when it was in the more expensive bottle. And this was not just snobbery at work. Brain scans showed that higher priced wines generated more activity in an area of brain that responds to certain pleasurable experiences. What about the so called cheap wines? Well, then the brain registered less pleasure from the same wine. P51

On the SAT, researchers asked students how often they had switched their answer and got it wrong, and they consistently overestimated. When asked how often they stuck with their 1^st answer and got the problem wrong, they underestimated. Students remember sticking with the 1^st is a better strategy than it actually was. The paradox is even though the actual outcome suggests you should do more answer changing, your memories of it suggest the very opposite. P55

The numbers don’t add up

The median of lifetime sexual partners for men is 7; for women it is 4. But as with so much in life, the number depends on how rich we are. In wealthy countries it is 10, and in poor countries it is 6… Why there should be such a big gap is unknown. But researchers have found that men exaggerate their number of partners, and women downplay theirs. p67

On average, everyone says they are better than average

One survey that 84% of doctors though their colleagues were influenced by gifts from drug companies. But as for themselves? Only 16% thought they were similarly influenced. P71

The coverup

When people take the pains to demonstrate that they are not corrupt in some way, they are actually more likely display exactly this corruption on subsequent tasks. P74

Keep your d**m eyes on the f******g road!

While driving, a single 2s glance away doubles the risk of an accident. So do multiple shorter glances that add up to 2s or more… A 2004 study showed that a driver takes about 86s on average to enter in data on a GPS, involving 20 to 30 glances away from the road. P84

Polka music actually works?

While wine shoppers perused the shelves, French music was played, and 40 bottles of French wine were sold. But when German music was played, sales of French wine plunged to just 20 bottles. Same was true of german wines; 22 bottles sold while German music was played, and only 8 when not… Of the 44 shoppers interviewed, only 6 said their choice was influenced by the music. P93

Why Safeway prices the way it does

Stores wishing to boost sales often use multiple unit pricing (4 for a $1.00 instead of $.25 each)… Such pricing resulted in a 32% increase in sales over single unit pricing. P105

Another way to boost sales is by using quantity limits – limit 10 per customer. The limit acts as an anchor. The higher the anchor the higher the sales. Only when the anchor gets absurdly high – say, 50, does its affect tail off. P105

First mover advantage is real in some contexts

The key to anchoring is the first number, because people process information in the order presented. And the best place is first. Being listed first on the ballot can add 3% to the results by major party candidates… Making the first offer in a negotiation adds significant advantage, because it serves as the anchor for future discussion… Research shows that whichever party – buyer or seller – who made the 1^st offer obtained a better outcome. P106

Why being young and inexperienced is a blessing

In April 2008, a 13 year old corrected NASA’s estimates that an asteroid would collide with the Earth. A few weeks before that, a 5^th grader discovered an error at a Smithsonian Institution exhibit that had gone undetected for 27 years… As something becomes familiar, we tend to notice less, not more. We come to see things not as they are but as they ought to be, as we assume. P113

And the 2005 best Halloween costume award goes to…

During Halloween 2005, the apparent suicide of a woman hanging from a tree went unreported for more than 14 hours – even though the body was plainly visible to neighbors and drivers. “They thought it was a Halloween decoration” explained the wife of the mayor. P114

The problem is that in remembering maps, we systematically distort them… Parisians when asked to map the city, consistently straightened the Siene. 92% understated the curvature. NYC cabdrivers do the same thing when asked to draw the streets of NYC… Further, people overestimate short distances, and underestimate long distances. And distances to a landmark are less than the distance from the landmark! Example: North Korea is to China, than China is to North Korea. P120

We constantly distort when we share information and retell stories 2.7 times on average. We omit, exaggerate or minimize info in 61% of our stories, but we admit doing this only 42% of the time. So quite a bit is unconscious. P130

Live fast, die poor

If you like to drive fast, the odds are you also like to trade stock a lot… For each additional speeding ticket this was correlated with an 11% increase in the turnover rate of driver’s stock portfolio. P134

Men also tend to trade stocks more often than women – 45% more often… And when aren’t married, the difference is even starker: single men trade 67% more often than single women. P135

Shoot first, and ask questions later

The US Army found that male soldiers tended to shoot people that they shouldn’t shoot (friendly fire), but female soldiers tended not to the shoot the people they should shoot (kill the enemy). P136

Living while being male is hazardous to your health

Men are 3 times as likely to be involved in an automobile fatality. They are also more likely to die from drowning or accidental poisoning. P138

But men don’t remember any of that in any case

Men tend to forget their mistakes more readily than women, and mistakes appear to dog women in ways that don’t bother men. Women indicate that failure affects their self esteem more than success. No such difference has been found in men. P140

When it comes to solving problems, a lack of confidence has been shown to affect not only the outcome we achieve but the approach we take… Self doubters are slower to abandon faulty strategies and less likely to come up with alternatives. P142

If parents are fearful they may keep their children close by, reducing the size of the home range. City kids may also not wander as far as country kids. But in general, 2 trends hold true: the home range for kids expands rapidly between ages of 6 and 9, and the range is universally larger for boys. P145

When researchers studied the subset of girls who traveled most freely and widely in their local areas, they found that these girls use about the same amount of detail in their maps as boys do. P146

When children are allowed to roam freely over an area, and closely explore rocks, trees, creeks, and the like, they seem to develop a deeper understanding of place. P146

It pays to be right I suppose

Almost everyone is overconfident – except the people who are depressed, and they tend to be realists. P149

And you could of bought $700 worth of donuts!

On average, gym members overpay by $700… 80% of monthly paid members would have been better off with a per visit plan… Why do they do it? The overestimate their self control, and confuse what they should do with what they will do. P152

When you don’t go the gym, the feedback is weak (you don’t get weak or fat immediately). And when feedback is weak, it is easy to ignore or distort. In the case of not going to the gym the signal is laziness. But we don’t like that signal, so we ignore it, and come up with rationalizations (traffic was bad, I’m feeling kinda sick, work was too hard, etc.) p159

Why are weather forecasters so well calibrated (accurate) when the rest of us aren’t (think economists especially)? The answer: corrective feedback… Forecasting started in 1920 in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico by a former schoolteacher cum railroad man cum grocery clerk, who began to provide farmers with a probability of rainfall so they could decide whether to cut and cure alfalfa on dry days. The farmers wanted to know if there was a good chance of rain so as not to cut that day… Eventually this system spread from Connecticut in 1954 to SF in 1956 to LA in 1957 and finally in 1965, nationwide… Analysts have found, using 150,000 forecasts over a 2 year period, that when forecasts predict a 30% chance of rain, that it rained almost exactly 30% of the time! P156

Betcha that you’re a self deluder

Initial success has a powerful influence over you. Students who guessed head and tails correctly during repeated coin flips became convinced that they were skilled enough at guessing, and that they could actually make successful prediction more than ½ of the time… 40% even felt that they could actually improve with practice. This is the illusion of control. P162

Horseracing handicappers were no more accurate with 40 pieces of information than with 5. But – and this was important – using more information did increase their confidence… from under 20% to over 30%. P165

Overconfidence quiz: http://www.tim-richardson.net/misc/estimation_quiz.html

Just for the record I got 8 out 10 correct – 80% confidence rating. I thought of course that I would get at 90% rating, so I failed. 99% of people fail to achieve this result.

Hooray for Cliffs Notes!

Students who were given 20 to 30 min learned more in that time from reading chapter summaries than reading the chapters. This was true if they were tested immediately after the reading, or tested 1 year later. P163

Mulligan

What percentage of 6 foot putts did PGA golfers on tour make? A former Amateur champion guessed over 80% Another veteran said ‘if you aren’t making 85%, you aren’t making any money. The actual average for the best golfers in the world is a measly 54.8%... Also the success rate in putting for par vs a birdie is far higher, 25% higher at a 5 ft distance. This suggests that psychological pressure affects even the best of golfers. p170

Chess grand masters, who typically have logged over 30,000 hours of play, can recall the positions of every piece nearly perfectly after a brief glimpse. Less experienced players, got the positions right only 50 to 70% of the time. What accounts for the difference? It is not that the grand masters have better memories, because if the board is scrambled in random positions, the grand masters have no better recall. The grand masters only had better memory when the pieces were in positions that made sense – or when they were part of a pattern that they recognized. P174

Witch doctors in our midst

Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20% of the time… So millions of people are treated for the wrong disease. But the really shocking thing is this: the rate of misdiagnosis has not really changed since the 1950s according to JAMA. Compare that to aviation. The Navy’s accident rate decreased from 50 accidents per 100,000 hours flown in the 1950s to only 1.5 today… Civilian airlines have improved their safety records by over 65% in just the past 10 years alone… Why is this? Unlike pilots, doctors don’t go down with their planes. This difference gives pilots a powerful incentive to eliminate errors. P193

But there’s more. Junior staff members should be allowed to question decisions made by senior staff members. When airline pilots were asked, nearly all of them – 97% - agreed with this statement. But only 55% of surgeons agreed… One survey of hand surgeons revealed that they operated on the wrong site (hand) at least once in their careers. P195

The golden state of mind

Every year the Harris poll asks Americans to name the state they would most like to live. And every year for the past five years the answer has been CA… But at last count over 2.2M Californians moved to another state, according to the census bureau. P201

The true golden goose

40% of rebate coupons are never redeemed. We overestimate our ability to fill out and mail them in, but factor the rebate into the purchase price... This misprediction is also why gift cards are such a bad idea… Unused gift cards together add up to an $8B per year boon for retailers, since it is pure money in the bank. P203

S**t happens; just deal with it

½ of the patients faced the possibility of having either colostomies reversed at some point in the future; for the other ½, the operation was permanent. Over a 6 month period, the patients were asked to rate their life satisfaction. If you’re like most people, you probably think those with the reversible colostomies would be happier, since we all dread finality… But it turns out those with permanent conditions were happier… Why? Hope impedes adaptation. If you’re stuck with something, you learn to live with it. And the sooner you learn to live with it, the happier you’ll be. P205

As counterintuitive as it may sound, when it comes to happiness, there’s a good deal of evidence that circumstances don’t matter as much as we might think. Researchers have found that social status, education, income, marital status, nor religious commitment account for no more than 3% of the variation in reported levels of happiness. Persons with severe disabilities ranging from quadrapelgia to blindness consistently report high levels of happiness. P206

Want to make fewer mistakes? Become a pessimist

The next time you have a major decision to make, ask yourself ‘What could go wrong?’ This may strike you as needlessly pessimistic, but thinking positively has limitations, among other things it can blind us to the pitfalls that lay camouflaged inside our ideas… If you get people to play devil’s advocate with themselves – asking what evidence is against this is – overconfidence is pretty close to eliminated. So give it a try. P214 Now, I’m too depressed and underconfident to try!

Only trust a statistician

The CIA has concluded that its’ Analysts should give little weight to anecdotal and personal case histories unless they are know to be statistically typical, and perhaps no weight at all if the aggregate data based upon a more valid sample can be obtained. So ask for averages not testimonials. P215

Outliers** by Malcom Gladwell

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:55:00 +0000

In the triology of Gladwell books, this is not a case of the third time being a charm. Blink was the best, and Tipping Point was a revelation as well. There are definitely some points to ponder, but I found the final chapter about the Gladwell's family history to be the most interesting, since I've come to know Malcolm over the years from his work.

Why was the mortality rate from all causes so low (30 to 35% lower than usual) in Roseto, PA?

Dieticians analyzed the typical Rosetan’s eating habits, and they found a whopping 41% of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk 6 miles. They smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity. If diet and exercise didn’t explain the findings, then what about genetics? Researchers tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the US to see if they shared the same remarkable good health. They didn’t. Was it possible that there was something about the eastern foothills of Pennsylvania? The 2 closest towns were just a few miles away, but it turned out that the death rate from heart disease for men over 65 was 3 times higher in these towns. The secret wasn’t diet, exercise, genes or location – but Roseto itself… The inhabitants had transplanted the paesani culture of Southern Italy creating a powerful protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. P9

Research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t just work harder or even much harder. They work, much, much harder… In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise in an endeavor: 10,000 hours. P39

10,000 hours is an enormous amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents that encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part time job, there won’t be enough time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into a special program – or some extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours. P42

If you live some rocky mountainside, you can’t farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that develops around being herdsmen is very different from that which develops around the growing of crops. The survival of a farmer depends on cooperation in a community. A herdsmen is off by himself. Farmers don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night… Herdsmen have to be aggressive; he has to make it clear in his words and deeds that he is not weak. A culture of honor develops in such herding areas… The Appalachia region in the US is a mountainous region where such a culture of honor developed, as well as the wild west ranch and range lands. P167

The plane loss rate for an airline like United between 1988 and 1998 was .27 per million departures (or 1 plane crash per 4 million takeoffs)… The loss rate for Korean Air in the same period was 4.79 – more than 17 times higher! P180

In a typical crash, the weather is poor – not terrible, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little more stressed than usual. The plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52% of crashes the pilot has been awake for 12 or more hours, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44% of the time, the pilot/co-pilot have not flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other. P184

The typical accident involves 7 consecutive human errors… These 7 errors are rarely problems of knowledge or skill. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other doesn’t catch the error. P184

Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up. P197

Many airlines now teach a standardized procedure for copilots to challenge the pilot if he thinks something has gone awry. First, he states that he’s concerned about this problem. If the captain fails to respond, he then says that the situation is unsafe. And if that fails, the first officer is required to take over the airplane. P197

Here are the top and bottom 5 countries based upon Power Distance Index (attitudes toward hierarchy & respect of authority)

5 highest

Brazil
South Korea
Morocco
Mexico
Philippines

5 lowest

5. US

4. Ireland

3. South Africa

2. Australia

1. New Zealand

If you compare this list to the ranking of plane crashes by country, they match up very closely. P209

Here’s a report of an actual event in the cockpit of a Korean Air flight:

The 1^st officer got confused while listening to Air Traffic Control, and mistakenly put the plane on a course intended for another plane. The flight engineer picked up that something was wrong, but said nothing. 1^st officer was also not happy, but said nothing… Despite good visual conditions, the crew didn’t look out and see that the current heading would not bring them to the airport. Finally the radar in the plane announced the mistake, and the captain HIT the 1^st officer with the back of his hand for making the error. Hit him with the back of his hand? P214

Take a look at this sequence, reading them aloud. Look away for 20 seconds and try to memorize them:

4 8 5 3 9 7 6

If you speak English, you have 50% chance of remembering all of them in order correctly. If you’re Chinese, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because the human brain stores digits in a memory loop that runs for 2 seconds. Saying the numbers in English often takes more than 2 seconds. The Chinese language allows them to fit all 7 numbers into 2 seconds. P228

The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. 11 is ten one. 12 is ten two. 24 is two tens fours, and so on. That difference means that asian children learn to count much faster than Americans. 4 year old Chinese can on avg count to 40, while Americans can only reach 15 on avg, and don’t reach 40 until age 5, so they are a year behind. P229

Bushmen and women work no more than 12 to 19 hours per week to satisfy their caloric needs. That’s less than 1000 hours per year… A peasant in 18^th century Europe worked from dawn to noon 200 days/year or 1200 hours per year. This was often interspersed with brief periods of tremendous work during spring planting and fall harvest, with idleness in summer and winter… If you were a peasant in southern China by contrast, you didn’t sleep through the winter, you worked 3000 hours per year. P235

The thing about rice farming is not only do you need phenomenal amounts of labor, but its very exacting. The fields must be perfectly level, that the water is present for just the right amount of time, the distance the seedlings are spaced. It’s not like putting corn in the ground in mid-march, waiting for the rain, and harvesting in the late summer. You’re controlling all of the inputs in a very direct way. And when you have something that requires that much care, the overlord must have a system that gives the actual laborer some set of incentives. That’s why you get fixed rents in China. Thus a good crop provides an incentive to the rice farmer to innovate to increase yields. Rice is a crop that doesn’t do well with slavery or feudal wage labor. It would be just too easy to leave the irrigation water open a few seconds too long and there goes the whole field. P237

The countries that score the highest in math and science achievement are those countries where the students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same whose students do the best in solving math problems… We could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in a Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measure how hard they were willing to work. P248

When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores for rich kids go up by a whopping amount. Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is a result of the difference in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school. P258

Made to Stick by Nicholas Carr **

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:46:00 +0000

Carr has written about technology, and namely trends that impact the industry. Previously it was that IT doesn't matter, and now it is how what's left of IT won't matter further since everything will become a utility available online. This trend will, if proven true, slowly upset the current vendors who sell equipment and software, and replace them with utilities over the internet. Very similar to a trend that happened 100 years ago regarding electrification. The world is looking good for the likes of Google, Salesforce, and Amazon given his predictions, and looking very bad for Dell, Microsoft, IBM, and the likes.

Deja vu all over again

Once it becomes possible to provide a technology centrally, large scale utility suppliers arise to displace the private providers. It may take decades for companies to abandon their proprietary supply operations and all the investments they represent. But in the end the savings offered by utilities become too compelling to resist, even for the largest enterprises. The grid always wins. P16 [How electricity became a utility. The same is happening now for computing power.]

How to build a Googleplex

Each Google datacenter contains one or more clusters of custom built servers. The servers are little more than homemade PCs contructed of cheap commodity microprocessors and hard drives purchased in bulk directly from manufacturers. Rather than being wired together inside boxes, the computers are attached to tall metal racks with Velcro, making it easy to swap them out should they fail [and reducing the cooling the required by leaving the components open to the air]. Each computer receives power through a power supply invented and engineered by Google to minimize energy consumption… The company even owns much of the optical fiber cabling that links its datacenters together… Google maintains a copy of virtually the entire internet, gathered continually by spidering the contents of the billions of pages it discovers link by link on the web. P66

Companies like Google and Yahoo will likely be eager to supply us with all purpose utility services, possibly including thin client devices, for free – in return for the privilege of showing us ads. We may find in 20 or so years that the personal computer has become a museum piece, a reminder of a curious time when all of us were forced to be amateur computer technicians. P81

The good news: Don't worry about IT jobs being outsourced anymore

The bad news: The jobs are simply being destroyed

In the long run, the IT dept is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form. It will have little to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individuals will be able to control the processing of information directly w/o the need for legions of technical specialists. P118

When everyone is an expert, then no one is

As user generated content continues to be commercialized, it seems likely that largest threat posed by social production won’t be to big corps but to individual professionals – to journalists, editors, photographers, researchers, librarians, etc. who can all be replaced by people not on the payroll… Why pay a pro to do something that an amateur is happy to do for free. P142

Hey, do I look like Sisyphus?

It seems increasingly clear that computerization has played a central role in the shift [of wealth to the smallest and richest segment of society], particularly in holding down the incomes of the bulk of Americans… Unlike earlier technologies that caused discrete changes such as the steam engine, the ongoing advances in technology offer the workers no respite. The displacement is now continuous. The pressure on wages is relentless. P145

Banner Headline in 2012: Craigslist killed the NY Times

When bundled into a print edition, hard journalism can add considerably to overall value of a newspaper… Online however most hard journalism becomes difficult to justify economically… In general articles on serious and complex subjects from politics to wars to international affairs fail to generate attractive click through ad revenues. Compare that to soft articles on HDTV or buying a new car or retirement ideas… As soon as the newspaper is unbundled an intricate and until now largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists and overseas correspondents. Each article and piece of content has to complete separately for ad revenue in isolation. P156

The Times of London has begun training its reporters to craft their stories in ways that lead to higher placements in search engine results. P156

The unbundling of content is not unique to newspapers, it is a common feature of most online media. iTunes unbundled music, making it easy to buy just 1 song instead of a bundled album. TiVo and ondemand cable are unbundling TV, separating programs from networks and schedules. YouTube goes even further and separates brief clips from the show itself. P157

As every piece of content is left to fend for itself, society may end up sacrificing quality. We may find a culture of abundance being produced by many amateurs is really a culture of mediocrity – many miles wide but only an inch deep. 157

Is Google what Orwell had in mind all along?

Google has developed audio fingerprinting that uses the mic on your PC to monitor the ambient audio in your room [listen to you!]. If you have your TV on, a sample of the audio signal can ID the program you’re watching by comparing it to an audio database. The company can then feed you stories or ads keyed to your favorite shows. P161

As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the internet will increasingly act as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences. P162

You are who you facebook with it seems

A study revealed that the more people converse and share info with others who hold similar views, the more extreme their views become… When like minded people cluster, the often aggravate their biases, spreading falsehoods, and they end up in more extreme positions than they started with… This phenomenon has been documented in 100s of studies in over a dozen countries. P165

Given how easy it is to find like minded people and sympathetic ideas on the internet, and given our innate tendency to form homogeneous groups, we can see that ideological amplification is likely to be pervasive online… In a further twist the very abundance of info available on the web may serve not to temper extremism but to amplify it further. P166

A botnet virus can scour a PC’s hard drive and monitor its users keystrokes, gathering sensitive personal info and sending it back over the internet to its master… Over 250,000 PCs are infected daily with botnet viruses. P175

France’s defense ministry banned the use of blackberry like devices by top govt officials since msgs are commonly routed through servers in the US and Britain. P181

There's no such thing as anonymous, suckers

AOL made available the anonymous search data for its subscribers recently. 3 NY Times journalists used the data for one subscriber. The terms were a mismash, ranging from “swing sets” to “single dances in Atlanta” to “dog who urinates on everything” to “school supplies for Iraq children”. They formed what the reporters called a catalog of intentions, curiosity, anxieties, and questions”. But there were enough clues in that catalog for the reporters to track down the name, address, and phone number of the so called anonymous searcher. She turned out to be a 62 yr old widow living in an Atlanta suburb. One morning she work to find her name and picture on the Times front page… Like a famous New Yorker cartoon which bore the caption “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. In reality not only is it known that you’re a dog, but it’s probably known what breed you are, your age, where you live, and what kind of dogfood you prefer. P186

In a country like China, anyone who assumes that he can act anonymously on the Web opens himself to dangers far beyond embarrassment…As phone calls and other conversations are digitized and routed over the internet, and as GPS chips proliferate, the ability of gov’ts of all stripes to monitor their citizens words and movements will only increase. P201

Google asked its employees to fill out an extensive online survey about themselves, answering some 300 questions on everything from programming languages they know to the magazines they read to the pets the keep. In 2007, Google began using the algorithms derived from these data to evaluate all job applicants, who are now required to fill out a long questionnaire. P203

Advertising and promotions have always been frustratingly imprecise. As the dept store magnate John Wanamaker famously said more than 100 years ago “1/2 the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which ½.”… The Economist compared traditional advertising to dropping bombs on cities – a company can’t be sure who it hits and who it misses. But with internet ads, companies can make lots of spearheads and then get people to impale themselves. P206

Big Brother wants to think for himself too now

Larry Page, founder of Google, spoke in 2002 at Stanford “The ulimate search engine is something as smart as people – or smarter… In 2003, he went into more detail suggesting that wireless brain appliances might be used to automate the delivery of information… In 2007 he stated “we are really trying to build an AI and to do it on a large scale. The fulfillment of this goal is not as far off as people think. P212

The more we teach this future megacomputer the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people when divorced from the machine, won’t feel like themselves – as if they’ve had a lobotomy. P226

Maybe the Mad Hatter wasn't so mad after all?

Ted Kacynski aka Unabomber had this to say on the same subject “As machines become more and more intelligent people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine made decisions will bring better results than man made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn them off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off will amount to suicide. P226

*** Game Theory at Work by James Miller

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Sharma) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:41:00 +0000

This is a fun, enlightening exploration of game theory with practical applications that you can use both in and out of the office. Among this book’s lessons are the following:

Never hire/date someone too eager to work for/go out with you
Have less trust in smokers; and more in exercisers
Many business people exhibit honesty not because they are moral, but because they are greedy
Eliminating choices can increase your payoff
Burning money can increase your wealth
Exposing yourself to potential humiliation can help you get a raise

Game theory is an approach that is rational, but that doesn’t mean that is how people do and should behave. You’ll discover that sometimes when we are irrational this leads to better outcomes, and evolution has used this fact to help you overcome a rational prisoner’s dilemma. So give yourself some credit, start playing hard to get, but keep exercising, and put out that cigarette. Read on, and you'll soon learn why.

Is it better to be loved or feared?
Imagine you fear your teenage daughter becoming pregnant . First you try to reason and urge her to be more careful. But when reason fails, parents resort to threats of disowning. Should the daughter believe you? Not if you love her… If your daughter became pregnant, she’d need you more than ever…. It would not be in your loving interest to actually carry out the threat. The manifest love thus weakens your negotiating strength. Interestingly if the daughter suspected that her parents didn’t love her, then she might believe their threat, and all of them may be better off. P9

One way trip
Cortez, conqueror of the Aztecs, employed the boat burning tactic, shortly after landing in Mexico, thus showing his enemies and potential allies that he would not be quickly driven back to Europe… No tribe would want to ally with Cortez if it thought that he might abandon his fight against the Aztecs… His promise to stay, by itself, was not believable… By burning the ships and eliminating the option of quickly retreating, Cortez guaranteed that he wouldn’t leave. P11
Another way to get a raise is to tell everyone in the firm that you will definitely quit if you don’t obtain it, and put yourself in a position where you would suffer complete humiliation if you were denied and stayed on the job… By effectively eliminating your choice to stay, your boss may find it in her self interest to give you the raise because she knows you will have to leave otherwise. P12

Out of control
Telling others that you have given up control is a common negotiating tactic… Broadcasting your lack of decision making authority makes it easier to turn down unwanted requests. P13

Giving up control by cutting off communications is another way to improve your position. You could first order your troops to fight to the death, and then leave your troops behind on an island to fight the enemy. If the enemy sees you leave and believes no one else has the authority to call of the attack, then they will think that your troops will fight to the end. P14

Brick wall
If an employee constantly pesters you for a salary increase, refusing to even listen to her demands credibly signals that she has no chance of prevailing. P15

Hey blackmailers should you go pro or remain an amateur?
Before paying a blackmailer you should examine her incentives to reveal the information. If they hate you, and would enjoy seeing you suffer, then they would likely release the information regardless of whether you pay or not… A one time blackmailer (who has no track record) would have a strong incentive to make further demands if given an initial payoff… The best way to deal with a 1 time blackmailer is probably to take your chances and not pay, or pay her off with small sums for the rest of your life… By paying the blackmailer throughout her life, you turn her into a professional and make it in her interest to be honest. P16

Motivating the workers
How could you motivate all employees with just one threat? First put all employees in some arbitrary but announced order. You tell employee 1 that if she doesn’t work hard, you will fire her. This would obviously make her work harder. Next, you tell employee 2 that if employee 1 works hard, and he doesn’t, you will fire him. Since employee 2 expects employee1 to work hard, he must work hard too. Does this again with employees 3 through N. Your employees can’t circumvent your system by colluding to be lazy because employee1 would never agree to slack off. .. The key lesson is that when you assign responsibility randomly, all might accept the chance to be punished and choose not to work hard. It’s much better to have a clear chain of punishment. P31

Survival of the vigilantes
Exhibiting insanity can enhance your threat’s credibility. Some forms of insanity in this regard are a thirst for revenge even at your own demise or detriment… Interestingly evolution may have made humans precisely irrational because of the benefits it can bring… To see the benefit of being vengeful consider a small village from prehistoric times. Imagine a group of raiders steal food from this village. A rational community would hunt down the raiders only if the cost of doing so was not too high. A vengeful group would hunt down the raiders regardless of the cost. If the raiders know of this reputation, they would rather find another village. Thus vengefulness confers an evolutionary advantage. P34

The optimal strategy to adopt with respect to legal vengeance is to convince people that you are insanely attached to vengeance when if someone did violate your legal rights you would really sue them even though lawyers are expensive. P34

Price Obscurity
Contract complications reduce the damage of price competition for similar items. When every firm uses complicated pricing schemes the benefits of undercutting your rival diminish since customers will be challenged to find the low cost provider amongst all of the complications. P48

Dominate your strategy
Is stopping at red light, and going on green a dominant strategy? Actually no it isn’t. You only want to do that if all the other drivers do the same. Same issue with driving on the right side of the road. Only works in countries where all other drivers agree to do the same. A dominant strategy is one you employ regardless of what others do. If everyone else holds their breath to the point of passing out, your dominant strategy is to breath freely, and you should do it regardless of what they do. P54

Why SF has so many gays
Most humans prioritize being able to find a sexual partner. This task can be more challenging for homosexuals since they make up only a small percentage of the population. Consequently when a homosexual decides where to live, the percentages of gays will rationally play a large part in this decision… The consequence will be that a few cities will become known for having a large gay population, gaining a reputation as a gay haven, and accelerating the process further. P93

Why money has any value
Money only has value because other people want it (it has no intrinsic value). Because so many people want it, it’s useful to have it because you can trade it for goods and services. Thus our use of money is based upon a massive coordination game. P98

Why high sunk costs can hurt you
Industries with high sunk costs are extremely vulnerable to price competition because it is rational for companies to ignore their sunk costs when setting prices… Imagine your airline always has 1 flight daily from NYC to Paris. Assume that if the plane were always full, you would need charge $400 per passenger to break even. What if your flight was only ½ full, but you could sell additional seats for $300 each? Should you fill the extra space? Yes, you’re better off with $300 than leaving it empty. Of course, since everyone in the industry will feel the same way, the market price could easily be driven below $400. P109

Balance of spam power
We have currently reached an email spam equilibrium in this country, if American spammers spam less (because we outlaw or regulate it), some users would get less sick of spam, and actually read more of it, thus increasing the benefits of foreigners (who are beyond US legal jurisdiction) to start spamming us. This would of course cause users to again ignore spam at the same rate. P110

Career criminal? Consider joining a union
Joining the Mafia would allow criminals who are arrested to overcome their prisoner’s dilemma (of ratting out their colleagues), because of the mafia code of killing rats. This added punishment changes the prisoner’s dilemma… In an effort to avoid the mafia death penalty, both criminals should now not cooperate and will thus get a lenient sentence. So Mafia membership clearly has its privileges since such membership will clearly lower your sentence if caught, and we can thus expect mafia members to commit more crimes. This gives the mafia a significant competitive edge in the market for crime. P118

Why some freak who can shoot a ball will make in 1 year more than you in your lifetime
A professional athlete like a basketball player has a very specialized talent. His skill in basketball can’t be transferred to other sports or professions. As a result, he won’t make anywhere near his basketball salary in another job… If a team offered lowered salaries, they would still attract top talent since this talent would have no other place to go. Indeed offering multi-million dollar salaries might shorten their careers because it makes it easy for them to retire early. But individual teams face a prisoner’s dilemma with respect to salaries. If all the teams offered a low salary, your team could greatly benefit by paying a higher wage and attracting the best talent. But once you do that, the others teams must counter. Offering high salaries is a dominant strategy for each team, even though they are all worse off because of it… Teams have tried to limit this dilemma with salary caps, and player’s unions fight against such caps. P125

All for 1, and 1 for all
As a soldier the best way avoid harm is to run away only if all of your fellow soldiers stayed and fought. But if everyone on your side runs with you, it will be easy for the enemy to hunt you all down and kill you. Thus, you all might be better off if everyone stayed than if you were all cowards… Armies solve this coward’s dilemma much as the mafia solves the prisoner’s dilemma – cowards are court marshaled and executed. P131

Why you should trust exercisers over smokers
Game theory teaches that when 2 people play a finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma game, they should always be mean… Unfortunately for game theory, when real people play this game, they are often nice to each other. Why do they do this?... Many people outside of game theorists are nicer than they should be, but still don’t like to be taken advantage of… You suspect that if you play mean, your opponent will be mean back to you [the golden rule].
Like smoking, betraying someone in repeated game, helps you today, but harms you in future periods. The less someone cares about the future, the more likely he is to betray you… People’s actions thus betray how much they care about the future relative to today. You have limited trust in smokers because they obviously care far more about the present than the future. Conversely someone who exercises is willing to make sacrifices today for future benefits, and is thus less likely to betray you for a short term gain. P138

In a fixed sum game (your loss is my gain), there is no benefit to cooperating, and players will always be trapped into a mean dominant strategy. P139

Green with envy, means a red light for trust
Just as you should be less trusting of smokers, you should be less trusting of envious people. Consider how envy affects the cost/benefit calculation… Envious people enjoy a further benefit of betrayal in seeing you get a lower payoff. Since envious players benefit even more greatly from betrayal, they are more likely to engage in it. Therefore you should be less trusting of envious people, and others should trust you less if they perceive you as envious. P139

Why nice guys finish last
Having a reputation for swift and harsh retaliation is vital to being able to sustain a good outcome in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma game. Wimps can never achieve a nice/nice outcome (optimal) for their rivals will always exploit them. If others fear your wrath, the nice/nice outcome becomes obtainable since others will grasp the consequences of betraying you. P141
Imagine you buy 1000 widgets each at $10 from 2 firms, and that both firms refuse to lower their price to $6. What would happen if you started buying all of your widgets from just 1 firm and you still pay them $10 each? Firm 2 might suspect Firm 1 is giving you a discount, even if Firm 1 promised (violating anti-trust) that they wouldn’t lower prices… To add to the mistrust, you may even want to ask Firm 2 to match the new price of $6. Firm 2 would almost certainly lower its price. P146

How guaranteed lowest price can actually work against you
If a supplier gave all of his customers most favored customer status, it would be much harder for him to secretly lower his prices, because he’d have to lower prices to all of his customers. He wouldn’t be able to lower prices to just those customers he wants to steal from a rival… When one supplier issues most favored customer agreements, its rival can have much more confidence that it is not being betrayed. So even though most favored customer agreements sound like they favor customers, they really help producers by reducing price competition. P148

Don’t bother trying to find a win/win outcome if you find yourself in a one period prisoner’s dilemma. In repeated games with no last period, you should strive to cooperate. P150

So why do we tip when we travel?
I think evolution has prepared for repeated interactions amongst a small group of people where cooperation would lead to the best outcomes. Travelling amongst strangers is not the environment that you were built for. It goes against your instinct to stiff the waiter, even though that is rational.

If you want them, then they don't want you
The person a company would most want to hire would probably not even bother applying because they would be so talented that they could easily make more than the offered salary. To combat the appearance of adverse selection, a candidate should then avoid appearing overeager, and play hard to get, letting the company believe that he has many attractive offers. If a candidate is really hard to get, then a company doesn’t have to worry about adverse selection. P152 Is the same true of dating? I suspect so. If you appear too eager, your suitor may fear adverse selection, and your appeal may diminish in their eyes. So playing hard to get, yet still being gotten in the end is the way to go it seems.

Why are most used cars lemons?
Adverse selection often creates a vicious cycle. Here’s an example in the used car market… As adverse selection lowers the price of used cars, fewer used cars of excellent quality are sold, which reinforces the adverse selection, further lowering the price, which causes even more quality cars to be withheld, which causes more adverse selection…How do you break this cycle? An inspection removes the hidden information that causes adverse selection (the fear of a lemon). An owner could also provide a warranty reducing the harm of hidden information. p155
If you have to cut corporate costs by 10% is it better to lower everyone’s wages equally by 10% or to fire 10% of the workforce? Adverse selection shows you why it is better to fire. If you cut everyone’s wages, the most productive workers will probably leave to higher paying jobs. Thus because of adverse selection you’ll encourage the worst workers to stay on board. If you fire your worst 10%, you’ll be better off. P156

Why everyone pays a big deposit
If over 95% of prospective tenants in your area are honest and responsible, you may figure there is no reason to inconvenience them with a security deposit. Unfortunately if you become the only landlord to not require a deposit, then adverse selection will cause you to get all of the deadbeats. P156

Why we don't always settle a lawsuit
Adverse selection should cause me to question why you would want to settle a legal suit. You would most want to settle when your case is poor… Consequently your signal to settle is a signal that I should go to trial…Only if I learn of the strength of your case would I be amenable to your offer. P157

Why we must screen for offenders
Organizations that work with children need to be especially concerned about adverse selection even if a very small percentage of the population sexually abuses children because these abusers are attracted to such jobs that allow them to interact with children. P158

Why dictators are usually big dickheads
To gain power in a dictatorship, one must be willing to kill. It’s not surprising therefore that almost dictators have been evil scum, for most dictators would have never risen to power if they had been nice… Adverse selection also explains why most revolutions go bad, producing narcissistic, brutal regimes as in the French, Russian, and Chinese examples. The only types of people capable of acquiring power in these revolutionary environments were people skilled at murder and betrayal… Monarchies are usually superior to dictatorships because of adverse selection. A man is born king, and is therefore average in morality, while dictators are exceptionally morally bankrupt. P158

What’s the purpose of a college education?
Most people attend because it increases their lifetime earning potential. How does it do that? The standard answer is that it teaches you useful things. Signaling theory shows that college could do the same thing without teaching you a thing…. It’s somewhat hard to be accepted and graduate from a decent college… Graduating thus signals to an employer that you have a decent level of intelligence, even if you didn’t learn anything. P165

Why is race used so often to judge
Using race as a signal can be rational if race is correlated with less visible characteristics – that you can’t easily measure… Signaling theory shows that if a college discriminates against some race (like Asians) then employers might desire to discriminate in favor this race. Alas, the reverse also holds true. Affirmative action can harm racial groups to the extent that a college sends a signal of quality… Tragically, even high performing members of the protected group will be hurt affirmative action because employers could more easily judge their race than their intelligence. P166

One hand tied behind my back strategy
What if, when a rival enters your market, you stop all advertising? If your rival has any chance at long term survival, this strategy would be disastrous. If however you are so confident that no one would buy your rival’s product even when you cease your ads, then you might want to stop. Your rival will realize that if he can’t beat you when you’re not even trying, that he has no hope when you do advertise. This is similar to how a gazelle will jump 18 inches vertically when seeing a cheetah. This is a signal of fitness by displaying conspicuously an outrageous feat. P167

A warranty implies quality
A free warranty signals quality. If the product is of high quality, the warranty will not cost the seller much. The seller of a lemon would be reluctant to offer such a warranty that would impose expensive obligations. P168

Why guys are stuck buying flowers on Valentines day
Game theory forces almost all men to give flowers to their women on Valentine’s Day… Men who don’t care about their women won’t spend the money. Could a man convince his girlfriend that he didn’t need to buy flowers? Yes, but it would be like a smart person convincing his employer that he’s intelligent even if he didn’t go to college. So no flowers from your man, will leave most women thinking that their boyfriend is disinterested in them. Plus men who don’t buy flowers and are not actually interested, will often lie and claim interest. Consequently it’s extremely difficult for men who care but don’t buy flowers to convince their girlfriends that they are devoted. P170

Why playing hard to get works
If you express extreme desire to date someone, she may question why you can’t do better than her.. The strategy to adopt is to convince her that you can date better women, but you are willing to make an exception with her. Ideally, she thinks that you’d barely consider dating her. Of course if she’s a supermodel, this strategy no longer works. Expressing intense interest in that case is normal for every male regardless of your worth, so feel free to express your desires, but be coy when pursuing ordinary mortals. P171

Single women sometimes pretend not to recognize available men whom they have previously met. This is a brilliant strategy for it signals that they have so many options that they need not keep track of them all. This feigned ignorance will impress not only the men they pretend not to know, but also people who find out about their deed. And the better looking the man they pretend not to know, the higher the opinion others will have of them. P171

It’s entirely rational to lose interest in someone who responds favorably to your advances. After all this means they can’t do better than you. If they’re too eager to accept, then perhaps you should look elsewhere. P172

What’s more important – looks or personality?
Beauty may be skin deep, but it conveys information far more quickly than personality does. We are also judged not just by our appearance but the company we keep. How can you then convince someone that you are a deep, caring person? The best way is to be completely superficial in your choice of mates. What would you think of a below avg man with a strikingly beautiful woman? He must be smart, sensitive, funny and/or rich. Now what you think of the same man with a below avg woman? Probably nothing. So if you want to trade up in the dating market, be superficial. P172

If you don't label it, then they won't believe you
When a product is not labeled for a particular characteristic (lowfat, organic, safe, etc.) you should assume that either most people don’t care about this trait, or that product’s trait is bad. Even if it were average it would be labeled. If it is not labeled, it must be below average. P174

How to get out of jury duty
Juries are supposed to irrational and forget that defendant who doesn’t testify is signaling that his testimony would hurt his case (want to get out jury duty in a jiffy, just say that if a defendant doesn’t testify it must mean he has something to hide). In business you don’t have to be held to this irrational standard and you are free to assume that silence signals the worst. For example a job applicant’s resume has holes, and he is not willing to fill them in. p174

Cracking under the stress
When an interviewer asks you hostile, stressful questions he is seeing how you handle it without breaking. Or if a manager asks if anyone has free time for a new project. An unthinking person eager to the please the boss will signal their idleness. Acting quickly can reveal more about you than you want. P175

Tell your supplier that the next batch is really important, and if there are zero defects you will pay him double. If the supplier is not too sharp and complies, then you’ll have proof of his true capabilities. P175

How affirmative action backfires
It would much harder to fire a minority worker because of the threat of discrimination, thus it might be more rational to hire a white worker because he can be more easily fired. It would be worth taking a chance on the white employee, but you would only hire a minority if you are almost certain that the would be productive… Similarly it is much harder to fire workers in Europe than in the US, consequently unemployment rates are lower in the US because American firms have a greater willingness to hire and fire workers. P180

You can often use the financial aid package from one school to get a better offer from another. Make the college believe that your choice will depend upon aid; have the college believe that you are price sensitive. P185

A price for everyone, and everyone has their price
Coupons seem silly, however they effectively separate the price sensitive customers by giving them a discount by trading time for money. P187

For $130, Universal studios will sell you a pass that lets you move to the front of the lines. Supermarkets could do the same thing. They could have an express lane where you pay 10% more for faster service. They could also charge different prices during rush hour (5pm to 8pm). P189 Dept stores use this tactic by offering sales prices during working hours. Same goes for happy hours.

Company boy
Employees should always be cautious of working for a business where the experience they gain would not be transferrable to other companies. Of course, the flip side is that that you are harder to replace. P203

Credit Crisis
A governmental guarantee to banks would mean that the bank needn’t worry about lending me the money, even if you knew I would squander it, since the gov’t will pay it back. Similarly deposit insurance for a bank allows the bank to attract deposits even if the bank makes extremely risky investments. P217

Beware the hidden price of test results
If there were genetic tests that could determine when someone would get cancer or heart disease, then insurance companies would be reluctant to cover anyone how had not been tested by the company because they would fear that these folks may have been tested without disclosing the results to the insurance company. P220 Thus not having the tests makes the system work like it does today. If the tests become prevalent, and private, then insurance premiums will most likely go up to cover the adverse selection.

The most important person in the world, and why Marx was wrong
100,000 people die in an earthquake in a faraway land and it is all over the news. At the same time, you cut off the tip of your pinky finger. A close friend calls you and asks “How’s your day been?” What are you most likely to mention, the earthquake or your finger?...Communism failed because it didn’t take account this fact, that humans are self interested. P231

How the not so good, make the good even better
Imagine that Bill is better than Jane at everything at work (Bill can produce 2 widgets or 7 sprokets in 1 day, Jane can only produce 1 widget or 1 sprocket in 1 day). If you fired Jane and only had Bill what would this cost your firm? Quite a bit actually, much more than 1 widget or 1 sprocket per day. How? Through trade. Imagine your firm had to create 2 widgets, and you only had Bill left. If you had kept Bill, during that 2 day period, you could have had Jane create 2 widgets, while Bill created 14 sprockets. So the lose of Jane cost you 14 sprockets, even though she could never product at that level. Her value is that she frees up a productive resource. P238

Why art can't become too expensive
Most everyone would rather have a nice painting or art work instead of a stock certificate as an investment. Consequently if art and stocks performed equally as well, no one would buy stocks. The market automatically adjusts the return on stocks and art, such that stocks out perform. P262

More on this subject:
Thinking Strategically by Avinash Dixit
Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
Sex and reason by Richard Posner
www.gametheory.net