Gaming the System
Some college students used game theory to get an A by exploiting a loophole in the grading curve. Catherine Rampell explains: In several computer science courses at Johns Hopkins University, the …
Explore Farnam Street Articles
Rethinking the Value of a Business Major
Melissa Korn reporting in the Wall Street Journal: “The biggest complaint,” writes Korn is that “undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don’t …
Susan Sontag on Style and Metaphors
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spent a lifetime on writing, art, and the commodification of wisdom. Her moving work, Against Interpretation, is regarded as a quintessential text from the 60s. In it, she …
What Lovers Tell Us About Persuasion
“The thing that is most likely to guide a person’s behavioral decisions isn’t the most potent or familiar or instructive aspect of the whole situation; rather, it’s the one that is …
Nassim Taleb: The Big Errors of Big Data
“I am not saying here that there is no information in big data. There is plenty of information. The problem — the central issue — is that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.” *** …
The Psychology Of The To-Do List
Ten years after David Allen’s bestselling productivity book Getting Things Done, scientific research caught up. We now know why the popular system is so effective. The key behind GTD is writing …
Ernest Hemingway’s Powerful Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Just after publishing his new novel in 1934, Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald asked his friend Ernest Hemingway for an honest opinion on the book. And respond Hemingway did. The letter, found …
Letting Children Fail Is Not A Dereliction Of Duty
In Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail, Teacher Jessica Lahey reminds parents that the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty. The stories teachers exchange …
Gossip
Nobody is untouched by gossip. We dish it. We listen to it. Or, least desirably, we are the subject of it. One definition of gossip is “bits of news about the personal affairs of others.” We gossip …
Plato’s Argument Against Writing
“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” — Chinese Proverb *** From Plato’s Phaedrus, commenting on the invention of writing. Here, O …
The (Really) Invisible Gorilla
Inattentional blindness is the phenomenon of not being able to see things that are actually there. This concept was popularized in 2010 book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by …
The sentiments of crowds
A lot of wisdom in this excerpt from Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics: … if there is one thing we know about the sentiments of crowds, it is …
Henry Singleton on Strategic Planning — Stay Flexible
Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business . . . if one took the 100 top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, …
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time
Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, remarks that the biggest cost to splitting our attention among various activities is to productivity. He offers some advice on getting back on track: …
Pride and Prejudice Turns 200
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. — Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice Today is the 200th anniversary of the …
The Secret Ingredient for Success: The Brutal Discipline Necessary for Self-Assessment
Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield, authors of The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, came out with an op-ed in the New York Times. The interesting …