Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
The difference is worth understanding. In a recent slate article, K.C. Cole writes: Persuasion requires understanding. Coercion requires only power. We usually equate coercion with obvious force, but sometimes it’s far more subtle. If you …
If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn’t work. If we confine our …
Too often we try to convince people when we really should persuade them. Seth Godin writes: Marketers don’t convince. Engineers convince. Marketers persuade. Persuasion appeals to the emotions and to fear and to the imagination. …
Nassim Taleb writing in an edge.org piece. Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological …
Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder is having a profound impact on how I see the world. In this adapted piece from Antifragile, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Taleb offers five policy rules that …
Freeman Dyson, writing in The NY Review of Books: On quantum physics The essence of quantum physics is unpredictability. At every instant, the objects in our physical environment—the atoms in our lungs and the light in our eyes—are making …
“A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on. …” — The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler *** Ryan Holiday’s …
Excerpts from Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal on the evolutionary function of religion. In his trailblazing book Darwin’s Cathedral, the biologist David Sloan Wilson proposes that religion emerged as a stable part of all …
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 that special. So when we encounter …
Vaughan Bell, of Mindhacks, wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian on ‘Lie Detectors.’ Although highly fallible, suspects are more likely to tell the truth when wired up to a machine. Bell goes on to explore why and whether …
There are many good reasons to read Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. You may be frustrated by the state of your organization’s strategy. You may be interested in identifying the characteristics of good strategy. Or you …
When was the last time you admitted you didn’t know something? Saying ‘I don’t know’ is hard. We can be so resistant to it that we end up not even knowing what we don’t know. This is dangerous. When you don’t know what you don’t know you’re …
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion Tyler Cowen with an excellent TED talk on the dangers of storytelling: So if I’m thinking about this talk, I’m wondering, of course, what is it you …
People everywhere differentiate each other by liking (warmth, trustworthiness) and by respecting (competence, efficiency). Essentially they ask themselves: (1) Is this person warm? and (2) Is this person competent? The “warmth …
One of the most interesting studies I’ve come across is the case of Dr. Myron L. Fox. Dr. Fox, an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior, presented a lecture on “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to …
Something to ponder. A sobering excerpt from Vaclav Smil‘s Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years: The first is that even the most assiduous deployment of the best available preventive measures (smart policing, clever …
At the recommendation of Warren Buffett’s Biographer, Alice Schroeder, I’ve been reading The Craft of Interviewing. Schroeder seems pretty crafty at knowing when, what, and how to ask questions that get to interesting answers. …
Robin Hanson makes a list of “Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth:” You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it. You have little …
“We want to cling to these incredibly outdated and simplistic measures of ability.” — Malcolm Gladwell *** Hiring is difficult and we tend to fall back on antiquated tools that give us a number (something, anything) to help us …
In this brief article Nassim Taleb (of Black Swan fame) touches on information, complexity, the randomness effect, over-confidence, and signal and noise. THE DEGRADATION OF PREDICTABILITY — AND KNOWLEDGE I used to think that the problem of …
Too Big to Fail” is a dilemma that has plagued economists, policy makers and the public at large. In Nassim Taleb’s lastest paper (with co-author Charles S. Tapiero) he takes a look. Abstract This paper examines the risk externalities …
We tend to feel we’re more able and smarter than we really are. We think we’re above average drivers, we’re above average investors, and we make better decisions than everyone else. According to a recent study, this …
In this video, Malcolm Gladwell speaks on the challenge of hiring in the modern world. One of those challenges, the mis-match problem, happens when we use criteria to judge someone for a job that is radically out of step with the actual …