Oliver Burkeman: The Power of Negative Thinking
“Think Positive.” That’s what magazines and friends advise us to do in order to cope with the stress of the holiday season. That’s the same advice that Norman Vincent Peale, …
Books
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
Daniel Solove, author of Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security, argues that privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide. The nothing-to-hide argument pervades …
Toni Morrison — Good, but never simple
Author Toni Morrison illuminates concepts of virtue, and its opposite: “Expressions of goodness are never trivial in my work, are never incidental in my writing. In fact, I want them to have …
Nate Silver: The Difference Between Risk and Uncertainty
Nate Silver elaborates on the difference between risk and uncertainty in The Signal and the Noise: Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921, is something that you can put a …
Cognitive Dissonance and Change Blindness
“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 …
Making Smart Choices: 8 Keys to Making Effective Decisions
Making decisions is a fundamental life skill. Expecting to make perfect decisions all of the time is unreasonable. When even an ounce of luck is involved, good decisions can have bad outcomes. So our …
Epictetus on Freedom, Thinking, Information and Conventional Thinking
Born as a slave in a wealthy household nearly 2,000 years ago in Hierapolis, Epictetus caught a lucky break when his “owner” Epaphroditus, let him study liberal arts. Through the Stoic …
What’s on Malcolm Gladwell’s Bookshelf
What we’re reading says a lot about who we are – or who we want to be. In a new feature in the Globe and Mail, Jane Mount asks 100 writers, artists, and foodies to describe the books that …
Are Cities More Innovative?
Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small …
The Worst Mistake of All: Outshining the Master
“Being defeated is hateful, and besting one’s boss is either foolish or fatal. Most people do not mind being surpassed in good fortune, character, or temperament, but no one, especially not a …
The Problem With Information
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 …
Why Catastrophes Happen
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 …
The Top Non-Fiction Books of 2012
Not my list but that of Publishers Weekly. Some interesting stuff made the cut. I picked up a few for stocking stuffers. My Cross to Bear — Gregg Allman, with Alan Light Like an old bluesman riffing …
The Future Is Not Like The Past
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 …
The Paradox of Skill
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 …
The role of error in innovation
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 …