Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Analytical reading is the fourth part in my series on ways to improve our reading skills. The first rule of analytical reading is that you must know what kind of book you are reading. Are you reading a novel, a play, or is it some sort of …
In order to improve our reading, we need to learn to ask the right questions in the right order. Don’t forget, reading a book, for any reason other than entertainment, is essentially an effort on your part to ask the book questions …
We unconsciously construct mental models of the world and these models help aid our thinking. This idea is not new. In fact, in 1943 Kenneth Craik proposed that thinking is the manipulation of internal representations of the world in his …
The success of any revolution requires, as Kurt Vonnegut writes in Bluebeard, three types of specialists. Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a …
It’s ok to say I don’t know. “There seems to be a widespread presumption that writing is prescriptive (or proscriptive) rather than simply observational or meditative,” writes Tim Kreider in his New York Times op-ed. Confident …
History will judge Bill Belichick as one of the greatest coaches ever. Not just in the NFL, where he coaches the New England Patriots, but in all of sports. He’s also incredibly smart. In his keynote address at the “Sports …
You might be surprised at what A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble’s former CEO, can teach you about conversations. This excerpt is from his book (kindle edition). In any conversation, organizational or otherwise, people tend to …
Is Dante still relevant in our new world? As if to prove this point, the most recent season of Mad Men kicked off with John Ciardi’s 1954 translation of Inferno: Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and …
King Solomon, thought by some to be the wisest man who ever lived, anticipated the economists concept of separating equilibria by about 3,000 years. In his most famous case, he proposed cutting a baby in half to separate the true mother and …
Overnight, Diederik Stapel went from respected professor to the biggest con man in academic science. For more than a decade his biggest experiment was deceiving others. In the end, Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 papers. Stapel …
Best known for accurate election predictions, statistician Nate Silver is also the author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t. Heather Bell, Managing Editor of Journal of Indexes, recently spoke with …
From Steven Pinker’s edge.org article The False Allure of Group Selection. Pinker argues that the more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it fits the facts of human psychology and …
“The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” — Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov …
An organization’s core capabilities are those activities that, when performed at the highest level, enable the organization to bring its where-to-play and how-to-win choices to life. They are best understood as operating as a system of …
Recent digital technologies generate a perfect storm of anti-attention, largely because they draw on the tremendous power of what B. F. Skinner called ‘intermittent reinforcement.’ We click the ‘new mail’ button in our email clients or look …
In The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, author Robert Kaplan offers a new way in which to view the global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and …
Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times, just wrote a book called Salt Sugar Fat. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy …
“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 most prominent in consciousness at the …
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 about many things from appearances to …
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 Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. The …
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 that they change. Today it is greed. …
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 publication of one of the most loved—and …
What exactly is culture? Melvyn Bragg is here to help us answer that question through his five-part Radio 4 series, The Value of Culture. Episodes: Culture and Anarchy, explores Matthew Arnold’s ideas about culture being a powerful …
We live in a multi-tasking world, but every so often we get lost in a task. We become so lost in what we are doing that time flies. We miss a meal, not because we are busy, but rather, because we are so lost in what we are doing that we …