Can Waiting Help You Make Better Decisions?
Great article in the financial times with the subtitle: Watching the world’s best tennis players at Wimbledon over the next fortnight can help us make better decisions. Here is what I learnt from …
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Happy Birthday Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born to a family in Geneva. His mother passed only a few days after his birth. A few years later, his father fled after a …
An Algorithm for Solving Problems
“He (Richard Feynman) was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to …
The Copernican Principle: How To Predict Everything
An old (1999) New Yorker article introduces us to J. Richard Gott III, a Princeton astrophysicist and some of his ideas on prediction. The core idea is that — despite what we’d like — we are not …
Daniel Kahneman: Debunking the Myth of Intuition
In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses the innate weakness of human thought, deceptive memories and the misleading power of intuition. By studying human …
Michael Lewis: Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie
Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, Boomerang, and Liar’s Poker, gives a commencement speech on the role of luck. Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of …
Why Do People Choke When the Stakes Are High?
Loss Aversion. In sports, on a game show, or just on the job, what causes people to choke when the stakes are high? A new study by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) …
Everyone Lies. Dan Ariely Explains Why
Research shows that nearly everyone cheats a little if given the opportunity. Dan Ariely, author of the new book, “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty,” explains why. Over the past decade …
The Noise Bottleneck: When More Information is Harmful
When consuming information, we strive for more signal and less noise. The problem is a cognitive illusion: we feel like the more information we consume the more signal we receive. While this is …
Why Do People Choose Political Loyalties Over Facts?
One of the theories is cognitive dissonance—we find it difficult to hold contradictory ideas in our head at the same time. Cognitive dissonance predicts that given the choice between our emotional …
Summer Reading List: Curated Recommendations For a Curious Mind
If you haven’t already decided on your summer reading list, here is a curated list of multi-disciplinary books that can help fill your brain. Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for …
Do You Know What You Don’t Know?
You probably don’t know as much as you think you do. When put to the test, most people find they can’t explain the workings of everyday things they think they understand. Don’t …
How To Find Work You Love
It’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time: On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are the …
Ten Commandments For Living From Philosopher Bertrand Russell
Philosopher Bertrand Russell: The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: 1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. 2. Do not think it …
How Stories Make Us Human
In his new book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall puts forth the argument that storytelling’s deceptions emerge from deeply human needs. The …