Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
“I know it is the fashion to say,” George Orwell once wrote, “that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own …
These excerpts were taken from Roger Fisher’s excellent book Getting It Done: How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge. Everyone has filters to select information that receives attention. If we don’t consciously choose them …
Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. …
“Their judgment was based more on wishful thinking than on a sound calculation of probabilities; for the usual thing among men is that when they want something they will, without any reflection, leave that to hope, while they will employ …
“Decision makers,” write Stefan Trautmann and Richard Zeckhauser in their paper Blindness to the Benefits of Ambiguity, “often prove to be blind to the learning opportunities offered by ambiguous probabilities. Such …
Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets: The argument in favor of “new things” and even more “new new things” goes as follows: Look at the dramatic changes that have been brought about by …
From Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen There are many subtleties and twists in the story … but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem …
Laurence J. Peter and James Hull defined The Peter Principle: “In a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their level of incompetence.” I think that’s fairly well understood, but what …
From Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us: The ubiquity of complex systems in the social world is important because it severely restricts the kinds of predictions we can make. In simple systems, that is, it is possible to …
Michael Mauboussin talking about his new book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing with the WSJ: The key is this idea called the paradox of skill. As people become better at an activity, the …
The British economist William Stanley Jevons in 1874: It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed …
Based on our dysfunctional national dialogue, Hamilton College Professor Paul Gary Wyckoff articulates the critical thinking skills he wants his students to learn. 1. The ability to think empirically, not theoretically. By this I mean the …
Don’t imitate large firms, just because they are large. Large, prestigious, and successful firms are chosen not only on the assumption that following them will produce better results but also as a way to bring a measure of legitimacy, …
From Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us: Historical explanations, in other words, are neither causal explanations nor even really descriptions—at least not in the sense that we imagine them to be. Rather, they are stories. As …
None of us really likes honesty. We prefer deception —but only when it is unabashedly flattering or artfully camouflaged. Groups seem to need to believe that they are superior to others and that they have a purpose greater than just passing …
Jaron Lanier in You Are Not A Gadget commenting on the limits of crowd wisdom: There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often …
Robert Pozen writes an interesting piece in the New York Times on what happens when you value busyness over achievement. It’s 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you’ve finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of …
When it comes to learning something new, depth beats breadth. In both fields, players tend to get attached to fancy techniques and fail to recognize that subtle internalization and refinement is much more important than the quantity of what …
Tom Stafford discusses a lot of the psychological principles that make rational bidding hard. Auctions also hit on many psychological persuasion techniques: First, auctions use the principle of scarcity, whereby we overvalue things that we …
What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill? Is it listening to a lecture? Reading a book? Just doing it? According to Daniel Coyle in The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills, “Many hotbeds use an …
William Deresiewicz with an insightful article in The American Scholar arguing that we’ve fallen into the trap of scientism: the belief that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Reading fiction increases our ability to …
There is a lot of wisdom in this: The challenge with history, however, is that it’s a very fickle teacher. Which is a lot of the key to understanding history is what the circumstances were. And what we tend to do when we study history …
That’s the ambitious question that Nate Silver tries to answer in The Signal and the Noise. The book appeals to me because it “takes a comprehensive look at prediction across 13 fields, ranging from sports betting to earthquake …
Anthony Gottlieb writing in the New Yorker: Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from Western, industrialized countries, mostly …