David McRaney's Blog, page 35

YANSS Podcast – Episode Seven

The Topic: Common Sense

The Guest: Kevin Lyon

The Episode: Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

Superman’s heat vision, from “Superman,” courtesy Warner Bros.

(There is still time to enter the preorder contest and win a shirt or a signed book: details here)

How would you define common sense?

I like the American Heritage dictionary’s definition: “Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge; native good judgment.” I like it because it’s describing something that doesn’t really exist, at least not in such a laudable form as that definition suggests. Faith in, and respect for, common sense is something that this entire You Are Not So Smart project is devoted to squashing.

Your common sense is informed by imperfect inputs decoded through biases and heuristics defended by logical fallacies stored in corrupted memories that are unpacked through self-serving narratives. Native good judgment? Well, sure, sometimes, but there’s a reason why we had to invent the scientific method. Native judgment is pretty unreliable.

My new book, You Are Now Less Dumb, spends many pages discussing superseded scientific theories and the implications that they bring up – stuff like humors and putting the Earth at the center of universe. You can read an excerpt here at Big Think: The Common Belief Fallacy.

The connection between common sense, superseded scientific theories, and becoming less dumb is the subject for this episode’s podcast. I interview Kevin Lyon, a biology teacher and friend who is one of those people who is so smart that you feel yourself becoming a better person just listening to him ramble. I think you’ll love this interview.

Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies

After the interview, as in every episode, I read a bit of self delusion news and taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of the new book, You Are Now Less Dumb, and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Cody Johnson who submitted a recipe for fudgy oatmeal cookies. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.

Links:

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

The Cookie Recipe

10-Hour eye laser battle at Everything is Terrible

Interactive vitamin infographic from Information is Beautful

The Vitamin Myth at The Atlantic

New Book Excerpt: The Common Belief Fallacy

A scene from the new trailer for You Are Now Less Dumb. See the video here: http://youtu.be/zWSe2qezhm4

If you head over to Big Think right now you can read an excerpt from my new book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” available for preorder this very second.

Here is the link to the excerpt: The Common Belief Fallacy

Here is a link to learn more about the new book: You Are Now Less Dumb

Many people are asking about how to get one of those nifty confirmation bias shirts I’m giving away as part of the promotion for the new book. Here is the link to buy them: YANSS Merchandise

New Book: You Are Now Less Dumb – Win shirts and signed books!

The Book Trailer for You Are Now Less Dumb by www.plus3video.com

You can preorder my new book right now.

Amazon - IndieBound -  B&N - BAM - iTunes

It will appear in stores on July 30, but you can have one reserved and made ready to ship to you in about a minute. If you do that, you can use the receipt to enter a nifty contest. Details on the contest after these highlights…

Here are just a few of the hundreds of new ideas you’ll stuff in your head while reading You Are Now Less Dumb:

* You’ll learn about a scientist’s bizarre experiment that tested what would happen if multiple messiahs lived together for several years and how you can use what he learned to debunk your own delusions.

* You’ll see how Bill Clinton, Gerard Butler, and Robert DeNiro are all equally ignorant in one very silly way that you can easily avoid.

*You’ll learn why the same person’s accent can be irritating in some situations and charming in others and how that relates to poor hiring choices as well as avoidable mistakes in education.

*You’ll finally understand why people wait in line to walk into unlocked rooms and how that same behavior slows national social change.

*You’ll learn why people who die and come back tend to return with similar stories, and you’ll see how the explanation can help you avoid arguments on the Internet. You’ll discover the connection between salads, football, and consciousness.

Here is a nice excerpt published over at Big Think: http://bit.ly/15TfNns

THE CONTEST

Here is how it works:

Preorder the new book.
Email your receipt to david [at] youarenotsosmart.com (or send a screenshot).

Every day for the next two weeks I’ll randomly pick two entries out of all the entries I’ve received so far. One person gets a You Are Not So Smart shirt, and the other gets a signed copy of the first book. You can still enter if you’ve already preordered the new book, just send the receipt you already have. Every sent receipt counts as an entry. That means you can buy, like, 437 copies and significantly increase your odds of winning a free shirt. You can only win once. E-books count too. (contest rules here)

THIS IS WHERE I TELL YOU HOW MUCH I LIKE YOU

Thank you. Again. I mean it. I want to hug the torsos and/or vigorously shake the hands of all the people who love what gets posted here. You made the new book possible, and I can’t wait for you to read it. If you are one of those people, know that preordering a book is just about the most amazing thing you can do for an author. If I met you in person, and you bought me a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun and then took me to see a man playing electric guitar solos inside a cage that protected him from bolts of lightning generated by a nearby Tesla coil, that still would not be as cool to me as you preording the new book (but it would still be very cool and please do that if we ever meet).

Why is that? The publishing world uses preorders to determine what is worth putting in bookstores, where it goes, who is worth inviting to interviews, and probably lots of other things I don’t even know about.

The room where the book was written and a tree extracted

Another reason that I really hope you grab a copy is that I almost died writing this book – seriously. A tornado pushed a tree into the room where I was editing the day before I handed in the final draft to my publisher. I saved a copy of the manuscript to Dropbox, and about 10 minutes later I was on the floor of a hallway with my wife covered in blankets and pillows. I’m writing this from that same room with a new roof above me and a new wall behind me. That was just a weird twist of fate though. The real reason I hope you get this book is that I think you will love it and share it with others.

“You Are Now Less Dumb” takes the ideas and themes of “You Are Not So Smart” and explores how self knowledge of self delusion can be used to become less dumb. It goes deeper than the first book, and the chapters are longer, the explorations more thoughtful – it’s simply a better book all around, and I loved writing it.

THE TRAILER

Before I explain where the idea came from, I’d like to endorse the people who did the hardest work. If you need a video, please contact Plus3. They made the trailer above, and they are great to work with. You can visit their website at http://www.plus3video.com.

It’s true. People educated and not so educated believed that geese grew on trees for at least 700 years.

A certain type of barnacle often found floating on driftwood was thought to be a goose egg case because it kind of, sort of, looked like a goose that lived in the same area. According to the naturalist Sir Ray Lankester, nature texts going back to the 1100s described trees with odd fruits from which geese would hatch, and there is evidence to suggest the belief goes back 2,000 years earlier.

Images from goose transformations from Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester

There was a particular breed of goose that lived along the marshes in Britain, and this goose migrated to breed and lay its eggs. The geese seemed to sometimes suddenly appear in large number in the same places where, while the geese were missing for long stretches, the barnacles tended to wash ashore. Wise, learned, monks explained to the people of the day that the barnacles were the geese in their early stages of development. Lankester wrote that the belief was further solidified by those same monks who also claimed you could eat a barnacle goose during Lent because, well, it wasn’t a bird. Apparently the belief was well-established and quite popular because in 1215 Pope Innocent III announced that, although everyone knew they grew on trees, the eating of barnacle geese was still strictly prohibited by the church, effectively closing the loophole created by those wily monks.

“They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds; nor do they ever hatch any eggs nor build nests anywhere. Hence clergymen in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they arre not flesh nor born of flesh!” – Gerald of Wales, medieval historian, writing as royal clerk to Henry II in Topographia Hibernica

The idea wasn’t difficult to accept to minds of that era because spontaneous generation was already an accepted truth yet to be torn apart by scientists using scientific methods. People still believed that rotting meat gave birth to flies all by itself and that piles of dirty rags could transform into mice and that most everything else came from slime or mud. A tree that sprouted bird buds seemed reasonable, especially if you after 500 years you had never once caught two of the adults mating.

Sometime in the 1600s the myth began to fade because explorers in Greenland discovered the birds’ nesting sites. The second blow came when people finally started poking around inside the weird buds. Lankester writes in his 1915 book, Diversions of a Naturalist, “The belief in the story seems to have died out at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the structure of the barnacle lying within its shell was examined without prejudice, and it was seen to have only the most remote resemblance to a bird.”

You don’t believe in goose trees today not because it’s a silly idea, but because scientists discovered evidence to the contrary and then passed that information around. The lesson here is that silly ideas don’t just go away because they are silly. You need a system to test them.

Science can be difficult to define without explaining a lot of explanations of explanations, but physicist Sean Carroll recently wrote on his blog that science can pretty much be boiled down to three principles (the following is a direct quote):

“Think of every possible way the world could be. Label each way an ‘hypothesis.’”
“Look at how the world actually is. Call what you see ‘data’ (or ‘evidence’).”
“Where possible, choose the hypothesis that provides the best fit to the data.”

Think about how you might apply those same principles in your own life – shopping, eating bagels, discussing politics, choosing a career, and so on.

Remember, without an agreed-upon system for making sense of reality and a network of observers questioning each other’s data and methods, goose trees remained common knowledge for hundreds of years. Imagine what weird, untested things might be floating around in your aquarium of beliefs.

I write about this in You Are Now Less Dumb because you should understand that your natural way of understanding the world is no better than the people who used to believe geese grew on trees. Just like them, you’re pretty terrible at being skeptical. Just like them, you prefer to confirm your beliefs instead of disconfirming them. It’s just the way brains work. You are less dumb because you were born after science became an institution and people had done science for long enough to falsify a lot of old myths.

The scientific method is a tool human beings use to prevent themselves from doing what comes naturally. Without it, you prefer to explain what you observe in reverse: you start with a conclusion and use motivated reasoning to defend an assumption formed through the lens of confirmation bias while committing the post hoc fallacy as you argue for your an explanation couched in narrative supported by hindsight bias and a mixed bag of other self delusions.

Science forces you to see your conclusions as what they usually are – hypotheses. It then makes a zillion other hypotheses and starts smashing them all to pieces with data. Eventually, the hypotheses that survive are more likely than the ones that perish. It’s a method you should borrow. Try it sometime, and after you’ve subjected your own hypotheses to abuse notice how that forces you to draw new conclusions about this strange, beautiful, complicated experience of being a person.

Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester

Sources:

Carroll, S. (2013) What is Science? http://www.preposterousuniverse.com - http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/b...


Hancock, A. (2012). Weird Myths About Gooseneck Barnacles. http://www.ucluelet.travel/ – http://www.ucluelet.travel/blog/weird-facts-about-gooseneck-barnacles


Heron-Allen, E. (1928). Barnacles in Nature and in Myth 1928.


White, B. (1945, July). Whale-Hunting, the Barnacle Goose, and the Date of the “Ancrene Riwle.” The Modern Language Review Vl. 40, No. 3


Wilkins, J. S. (2006). Tales of the barnacle goose. Evolving Thoughts. http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2006/08/15/tales-of-the-barnacle-goose/

You Are Now Less Dumb – Preorder Contest and Book Trailer

The Book Trailer for You Are Now Less Dumb by www.plus3video.com

You can preorder my new book right now.

Amazon - IndieBound -  B&N - BAM - iTunes

It will appear in stores on July 30, but you can have one reserved and made ready to ship to you in about a minute. If you do that, you can use the receipt to enter a nifty contest. Details are below. If you want to skip to that, just scroll down. But first…

Here are just a few of the hundreds of new ideas you’ll stuff in your head while reading You Are Now Less Dumb: You’ll learn about a scientist’s bizarre experiment that tested what would happen if multiple messiahs lived together for several years and how you can use what he learned to debunk your own delusions. You’ll see how Bill Clinton, Gerard Butler, and Robert DeNiro are all equally ignorant in one very silly way that you can easily avoid. You’ll learn why the same person’s accent can be irritating in some situations and charming in others and how that relates to poor hiring choices as well as avoidable mistakes in education. You’ll finally understand why people wait in line to walk into unlocked rooms and how that same behavior slows national social change. You’ll learn why people who die and come back tend to return with similar stories, and you’ll see how the explanation can help you avoid arguments on the Internet. You’ll discover the connection between salads, football, and consciousness.

THE CONTEST

Here is how it works:

Preorder the new book.
Email your receipt to david [at] youarenotsosmart.com (or send a screenshot).

Every day for the next two weeks I’ll randomly pick two entries out of all the entries I’ve received so far. One person gets a You Are Not So Smart shirt, and the other gets a signed copy of the first book. You can still enter if you’ve already preordered the new book, just send the receipt you already have. Every sent receipt counts as an entry. That means you can buy, like, 437 copies and significantly increase your odds of winning a free shirt. You can only win once. E-books count too. (contest rules here)

THIS IS WHERE I TELL YOU HOW MUCH I LIKE YOU

Thank you. Again. I mean it. I want to hug the torsos and/or vigorously shake the hands of all the people who love what gets posted here. You made the new book possible, and I can’t wait for you to read it. If you are one of those people, know that preordering a book is just about the most amazing thing you can do for an author. If I met you in person, and you bought me a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun and then took me to see a man playing electric guitar solos inside a cage that protected him from bolts of lightning generated by a nearby Tesla coil, that still would not be as cool to me as you preording the new book (but it would still be very cool and please do that if we ever meet).

Why is that? The publishing world uses preorders to determine what is worth putting in bookstores, where it goes, who is worth inviting to interviews, and probably lots of other things I don’t even know about.

The room where the book was written and a tree extracted

Another reason that I really hope you grab a copy is that I almost died writing this book – seriously. A tornado pushed a tree into the room where I was editing the day before I handed in the final draft to my publisher. I saved a copy of the manuscript to Dropbox, and about 10 minutes later I was on the floor of a hallway with my wife covered in blankets and pillows. I’m writing this from that same room with a new roof above me and a new wall behind me. That was just a weird twist of fate though. The real reason I hope you get this book is that I think you will love it and share it with others.

“You Are Now Less Dumb” takes the ideas and themes of “You Are Not So Smart” and explores how self knowledge of self delusion can be used to become less dumb. It goes deeper than the first book, and the chapters are longer, the explorations more thoughtful – it’s simply a better book all around, and I loved writing it.

THE TRAILER

Before I explain where the idea came from, I’d like to endorse the people who did the hardest work. If you need a video, please contact Plus3. They made the trailer above, and they are great to work with. You can visit their website at http://www.plus3video.com.

It’s true. People educated and not so educated believed that geese grew on trees for at least 700 years.

A certain type of barnacle often found floating on driftwood was thought to be a goose egg case because it kind of, sort of, looked like a goose that lived in the same area. According to the naturalist Sir Ray Lankester, nature texts going back to the 1100s described trees with odd fruits from which geese would hatch, and there is evidence to suggest the belief goes back 2,000 years earlier.

Images from goose transformations from Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester

There was a particular breed of goose that lived along the marshes in Britain, and this goose migrated to breed and lay its eggs. The geese seemed to sometimes suddenly appear in large number in the same places where, while the geese were missing for long stretches, the barnacles tended to wash ashore. Wise, learned, monks explained to the people of the day that the barnacles were the geese in their early stages of development. Lankester wrote that the belief was further solidified by those same monks who also claimed you could eat a barnacle goose during Lent because, well, it wasn’t a bird. Apparently the belief was well-established and quite popular because in 1215 Pope Innocent III announced that, although everyone knew they grew on trees, the eating of barnacle geese was still strictly prohibited by the church, effectively closing the loophole created by those wily monks.

“They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds; nor do they ever hatch any eggs nor build nests anywhere. Hence clergymen in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they arre not flesh nor born of flesh!” – Gerald of Wales, medieval historian, writing as royal clerk to Henry II in Topographia Hibernica

The idea wasn’t difficult to accept to minds of that era because spontaneous generation was already an accepted truth yet to be torn apart by scientists using scientific methods. People still believed that rotting meat gave birth to flies all by itself and that piles of dirty rags could transform into mice and that most everything else came from slime or mud. A tree that sprouted bird buds seemed reasonable, especially if you after 500 years you had never once caught two of the adults mating.

Sometime in the 1600s the myth began to fade because explorers in Greenland discovered the birds’ nesting sites. The second blow came when people finally started poking around inside the weird buds. Lankester writes in his 1915 book, Diversions of a Naturalist, “The belief in the story seems to have died out at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the structure of the barnacle lying within its shell was examined without prejudice, and it was seen to have only the most remote resemblance to a bird.”

You don’t believe in goose trees today not because it’s a silly idea, but because scientists discovered evidence to the contrary and then passed that information around. The lesson here is that silly ideas don’t just go away because they are silly. You need a system to test them.

Science can be difficult to define without explaining a lot of explanations of explanations, but physicist Sean Carroll recently wrote on his blog that science can pretty much be boiled down to three principles (the following is a direct quote):

“Think of every possible way the world could be. Label each way an ‘hypothesis.’”
“Look at how the world actually is. Call what you see ‘data’ (or ‘evidence’).”
“Where possible, choose the hypothesis that provides the best fit to the data.”

Think about how you might apply those same principles in your own life – shopping, eating bagels, discussing politics, choosing a career, and so on.

Remember, without an agreed-upon system for making sense of reality and a network of observers questioning each other’s data and methods, goose trees remained common knowledge for hundreds of years. Imagine what weird, untested things might be floating around in your aquarium of beliefs.

I write about this in You Are Now Less Dumb because you should understand that your natural way of understanding the world is no better than the people who used to believe geese grew on trees. Just like them, you’re pretty terrible at being skeptical. Just like them, you prefer to confirm your beliefs instead of disconfirming them. It’s just the way brains work. You are less dumb because you were born after science became an institution and people had done science for long enough to falsify a lot of old myths.

The scientific method is a tool human beings use to prevent themselves from doing what comes naturally. Without it, you prefer to explain what you observe in reverse: you start with a conclusion and use motivated reasoning to defend an assumption formed through the lens of confirmation bias while committing the post hoc fallacy as you argue for your an explanation couched in narrative supported by hindsight bias and a mixed bag of other self delusions.

Science forces you to see your conclusions as what they usually are – hypotheses. It then makes a zillion other hypotheses and starts smashing them all to pieces with data. Eventually, the hypotheses that survive are more likely than the ones that perish. It’s a method you should borrow. Try it sometime, and after you’ve subjected your own hypotheses to abuse notice how that forces you to draw new conclusions about this strange, beautiful, complicated experience of being a person.

Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester

Sources:

Carroll, S. (2013) What is Science? http://www.preposterousuniverse.com - http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/b...


Hancock, A. (2012). Weird Myths About Gooseneck Barnacles. http://www.ucluelet.travel/ – http://www.ucluelet.travel/blog/weird-facts-about-gooseneck-barnacles


Heron-Allen, E. (1928). Barnacles in Nature and in Myth 1928.


White, B. (1945, July). Whale-Hunting, the Barnacle Goose, and the Date of the “Ancrene Riwle.” The Modern Language Review Vl. 40, No. 3


Wilkins, J. S. (2006). Tales of the barnacle goose. Evolving Thoughts. http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2006/08/15/tales-of-the-barnacle-goose/

YANSS fans crash on Freud’s couch, read over canyons, write songs, mix drinks, and more

Brad Duffy at the Capilano Suspension Bridge

A while back I presented a series of quests to promote the release of the paperback version of YANSS and offered riches should those quests be completed (see the original post here).

Those quests, all but one, have been realized, and the rewards are traveling to the respective champions.

The following is an account of those who bested the challenges I put forth:

Quest the Tenth

Read the book in a famous location.

Matthew Corbishley at the Freud Museum in London

I asked for a one so nimble and brave that he or she might travel to the Freud museum in London and take a photograph reading the book…near…Freud’s couch, which I wrote about in the post on ego depletion, or travel to the Capilano Suspension Bridge and photograph yourself reading the book in the middle of the bridge I wrote about in the post on the misattribution of arousal.

Both quests were completed, each by an incredible person. Matthew Corbishley is pictured above at the Freud Museum, and at the top of this post you can see Brad Duffy on the bridge. They both will recieve a useless box, a phrenology head, a plush neuron, a Sigmund Freud puppet, and signed copies of the US, UK, German and Korean editions of the book.

Quest the Sixth

Create a mixed drink.

Tim Van Driel mixes a Fanboy Mindcrusher

I asked if there was one so brave and crafty he or she could create a mixed drink named after any topic ever covered on the blog, the podcast, or the book.

There was one soul as brave as I had hoped, and his name was Tim Van Driel. He wrote, “This mixed drink combines two concepts of self-delusion in a single drink: fanboyism and groupthink.”

This is the recipe he included:

The Fanboy Mindcrusher

2 oz Santiago de Cuba Rum
1 fresh lime
4 oz Coca Cola
4 oz Pepsi cola
ice

Fill a tall glass with ice cubes. Add rum. Rub the cut edge of lime on rim of glass then squeeze juice into glass. Add colas. Garnish with lime slice. Serve as follows and Enjoy!

First, ask your friend if they prefer Coca Cola or Pepsi.

If they are Coca-Cola fanboys, say “OK” and prepare/serve them the drink. After the drink is finished, tell the Coke fanboys that it had Pepsi in it.

If they are Pepsi fanboys, say “OK” and prepare/serve them the drink. After the drink is finished, tell them that it contained Coca-Cola.

Watch them mingle and share their experiences with each other. Enjoy! Watch for signs of groupthink when discussing the host.

Side note:

The Cuban Rum is meant to induce groupthink: While the Kennedy administration and the CIA planned the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba, they suffered from groupthink, (according to Irving Janis.) They were trying so hard for unanimity and harmony within the group, that they were unable to realistically evaluate the gravity of the situation. They sent a small number of Cuban exiles to attack Castro and were defeated. Castro and the Cubans have now bottled the chemical responsible for groupthink and added it to their rum. Some say that it keeps the Cuban population harmonious despite economic hardship.

Quest the Ninth

Create beautiful music yon bard.

I requested an original song to use as background music on the podcast – no singing. I chose one person out of the many who composed songs and he received an album download for Helena Jesele, an album download for Caroline Crawford, a $20 gift card to iTunes, the audiobook version, and a signed copy of the book.

Here is the winning song by Kyle Goins: My Little Pantomime

Quest the Third

Take a photo.

This quest tasked photographers to capture the image of the book and then post it to Instagram.

The first 20 received a signed copy of the book and a heartfelt missive.

Keep sending these, though. I love to see them.Just include the hashtag #youarenotsosmart or when you get the second book include #youarenowlessdumb.

Quest the Eighth

Record a marshmallow experiment.

I asked one stone-hearted hero to post a video of a human under five-years-old passing or failing the marshmallow test I wrote about in the post about procrastination. Oliver Palmer did this and will receive a Sigmund Freud finger puppet and couch and a signed copy of the book.

Oh, Oliver, the anguish in those children’s hearts. This is the painful video:

Quest the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth

Tweet. Post on Facebook. Find self delusion in the wild. Get into an argument. 

These easier quests were also completed, and the people who completed those quests received signed books, but for the sake of privacy and a commitment to avoiding boredom, I’m just going to say, thank you very much. You are amazing. This was so much fun.

Next week, look for a new contest and a new trailer for the new book.

YANSS Podcast – Episode Six

The Topic: Spending Money

The Guest: Elizabeth Dunn

The Episode: Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby – Source: Warner Bros.

Which would you rather have, a mansion the likes of Jay Gatsby, fully decorated and furnished, or the memories and photos of a month spent on the International Space Station? Would you rather own the kind of car they photograph for wall posters with doors that open in an unusual manner, or spend a year practicing guitar for a chance to play a single show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers? How about $1,000 cash or a gourmet meal for you and your friends cooked by and enjoyed in the company of Gordon Ramsay? Assuming in each of these scenarios you can only have one and never have the other, which would you pick?

When asked similar questions, most people choose the tangible things over the experiences. The material items just seem more valuable in the long run, and cash always seems more practical than a fleeting indulgence. Yet the research says if you are seeking long-term happiness, nothing compares to unique experiences, even short experiences, even bad experiences. Over time, things lose their luster, but memories do not. Memories grow and spread inside your mind like a tree that can always be harvested of its fruit. They become a part of you, increasing in value as you age and continuously providing stories and smiles long after a nice car becomes just a way to get to Taco Bell or a nice house becomes the place where you watch Breaking Bad before going to bed.

It’s peculiar, your inability to predict what will make you happy, and that inability leads you to do stupid things with your money. Once you get a decent job that allows you to buy new shoes on a whim, you start accumulating stuff, and the psychological research into happiness says that stuff is a crappy source of lasting joy.

That’s just a small part the book by this episode’s guest, psychologist Elizabeth Dunn. Happy Money, which she cowrote with marketing expert Michael Norton, is about the psychology of spending. Together they pored over the research into the relationship between money and happiness and came to the conclusion that if you want to be happy you should buy experiences, make those experiences treats instead of routines, share them with others, buy them as far in advance of when you will enjoy them as you can, and avoid wasting money on objects that won’t affect how you will spend your time on the typical Tuesday.

They also point out that money itself loses its power to enhance your satisfaction with life once you reach a certain income. Beyond $75,000 a year, in the United States, higher incomes only add very, very tiny bumps to overall happiness. The evidence suggests that the average millionaire CEO and her lawyer’s paralegal’s accountant’s dental hygienist are within a smidge of being equally happy day-to-day. If you make enough money to buy new tires when you need them, then you are probably not poor, and the research tells us that pretty much all versions of being not poor are basically equal, even being insanely rich.

Worse than all of this, if you do manage to become wealthy, they say you’ll take a hit to overall happiness by losing your ability to enjoy simple pleasures. At least, that’s what happens on average, again, according to the research. The wealthier the person, the less likely he or she reports a desire to pause and enjoy the serenity of a waterfall, or the desire to go on a hike. That’s time that could be spent doing something that only the super-rich could do. Consider this: If you show one group of people a photo of a pile of cash and another group of people an interesting painting and then give both groups quality chocolates, the group primed to put money on their minds will enjoy the chocolate less than the other group. Who wants to be so rich that chocolate is no longer delicious?

We talk about all of this and hear her suggestions on how to pursue happiness using evidence-based spending advice in the interview. This is information that’s definitely worth your time to absorb.

After the interview, as in every episode, I read a bit of self delusion news and taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of the new book, You Are Now Less Dumb, and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Mariam who submitted a recipe for apple toffee cookies. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.

Links:

Download - iTunes - Stitcher - RSS - Soundcloud

YANSS Cookie Recipes 

Happy Money 

Video: Elizabeth Dunn’s talk for PopTech

Elizabeth Dunn’s Homepage

The Slow Movement

How Not To Buy Happiness

Survivorship Bias

The Misconception: You should study the successful if you wish to become successful.

The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

Illustration by Brad Clark

In New York City, in an apartment a few streets away from the center of Harlem, above trees reaching out over sidewalks and dogs pulling at leashes and conversations cut short to avoid parking tickets, a group of professional thinkers once gathered and completed equations that would both snuff and spare several hundred thousand human lives.

People walking by the apartment at the time had no idea that four stories above them some of the most important work in applied mathematics was tilting the scales of a global conflict as secret agents of the United States armed forces, arithmetical soldiers, engaged in statistical combat. Nor could people today know as they open umbrellas and twist heels on cigarettes, that nearby, in an apartment overlooking Morningside Heights, one of these soldiers once effortlessly prevented the United States military from doing something incredibly stupid, something that could have changed the flags now flying in capitals around the world had he not caught it, something you do every day.

These masters of math moved their families across the country, some across an ocean, so they could work together. As they unpacked, the theaters in their new hometown replaced posters for Citizen Kane with those for Casablanca, and the newspapers they unwrapped from photo frames and plates featured stories still unravelling the events at Pearl Harbor. Many still held positions at universities. Others left those sorts of jobs to think deeply in one of the many groups that worked for the armed forces, free of any other obligations aside from checking in on their families at night and feeding their brains during the day. All paused their careers and rushed to enlist so that they help to crush Hitler, not with guns and brawn, but with integers and exponents.

The official name for the people inside the apartment was the Statistical Research Group, a cabal of geniuses assembled at the request of the White House and made up of people who would go on to compete for and win Nobel Prizes. The SRG was an extension of Columbia University, and they dealt mainly with statistical analysis. Other groups with different specialities were tied to Harvard, Princeton, Brown and others, 11 in all, each a leaf at the end of a new branch of the government created to help defeat the Axis – the Department of War Math.

Actually…no. They were never officially known by such a deliciously sexy title. The were instead called the Applied Mathematics Panel, but they operated as if they were a department of war math.

The Department, ahem, the Panel, was created because the United States needed help. A surge of new technology had flooded into daily life, and the same wonders that years earlier drove ticket sales to the World’s Fair were now cracking open cities. Numbers and variables now massed into scenarios far too complex to solve with maps and binoculars. The military realized it faced problems that no soldier had ever confronted. No best practices yet existed for things like rockets and radar stations and aircraft carriers. The most advanced computational devices available were clunky experiments made of telephone switches or vacuum tubes. A calculator still looked like the mutant child of an old-fashioned cash register and a mechanical typewriter. If you wanted solutions to the newly unfathomable problems of modern combat you needed powerful number crunchers, and in 1941 the world’s most powerful number crunchers ran on toast and coffee and wore ties to breakfast.

Here is how it worked: Somewhere inside the vast machinery of war a commander would stumble into a problem. That commander would then send a request to the head of the Panel who would then assign the task to the group he thought would best be able to resolve the issue. Scientists in that group would then travel to Washington and meet with with top military personnel and advisors and explain to them how they might go about solving the problem. It was like calling technical support, except you called a computational genius who then invented a new way of understanding the world through math in an effort to win a global conflict for control of the planet.

Illustration by Brad Clark

For instance, the Navy desperately needed to know what was the best possible pattern, or spread, of torpedoes to launch against large enemy ships. All they had to go on were a series of hastily taken, blurry, black-and-white photographs of turning Japanese war vessels. The Panel handed over the photos to one of its meat-based mainframes and asked them to report back when it had a solution. The warrior mathematicians solved the problem almost as soon as they saw it. Lord Kelvin, they told the Navy, had already worked out the calculations in 1887. Just look at the patterns in the waves, they explained, see how they fan out in curves like an unfurling fern? The spaces tell you everything; they give it all away. Work out the distance between the cusps of the bow waves and you’ll know how fast the ship is going. Lord Kelvin hadn’t worked out what to do if the ship was turning, but no problem, they said. The mathematicians scribbled on notepads and clacked on blackboards until they had both advanced the field and created a solution. They then measured wavelets on real ships and saw their math was sound. The Navy added a new weapon to its arsenal – the ability to accurately send a barrage of torpedoes into a turning ship based only on what you could divine from the patterns in the waves.

The devotion of the mathematical soldiers grew stronger as the war grew bloodier and they learned the things they etched on hidden blackboards and jotted on guarded scraps of paper determined who would and would not return home to their families once the war was over. Leading brains in every scientific discipline had eagerly joined the fight, and although textbooks would eventually devote chapters to the work of the codebreakers and the creators of the atomic bomb, there were many groups whose stories never made headlines that produced nothing more than weaponized equations. One story in particular was nearly lost forever. In it, a brilliant statistician named Abraham Wald saved countless lives by preventing a group of military commanders from committing a common human error, a mistake that you probably make every single day.

Colleagues described Wald as gentle and kind, and as a genius unsurpassed in his areas of expertise. His contributions, said one peer, had “produced a decisive turn in method and purpose” in the social sciences. Born in a Hungary in 1902 on a parcel of land later claimed by Romania, the son of a Jewish baker, Wald spent his childhood studying equations, eventually working his way up through academia to become a graduate student at the University of Vienna mentored by the great mathematician Karl Menger. He was the sort of student who offered suggestions on how to improve the books he was reading, and then saw to it those suggestions were incorporated into later editions. His mentor would introduce Wald to problems that made experts in the field rub their beards, the sort of things with names like “stochastic difference equations” and the “betweenness among the ternary relations in metric space.” Wald would not only return within a month or so with the solution to such a problem but politely ask for another to solve. As he advanced the science of probability and statistics, his name became familiar to mathematicians in the United States where he eventually fled in 1938, reluctantly, as the Nazi threat grew. His family, all but a single brother, would later die in the extermination camp known as Auschwitz.

Soon after Wald arrived in the United States he joined the Applied Mathematics Panel and went to work with the team at Columbia stuffed in the secret apartment overlooking Harlem. His group looked for patterns and applied statistics to problems and situations too large and unwieldy for commanders to get their arms around. They turned the geometry of air combat into graphs and charts and they plotted the success rates of bomb sights and various tactics. As the war progressed, their efforts became focused on the most pressing problem of the war – keeping airplanes in the sky. 

A B-24 is shot down over an island in the Pacific – Source: http://www.britishpathe.com/

In some years of World War II, the chances of a member of a bomber crew making it through a tour of duty was about the same as calling heads in a coin toss and winning. As a member of a World War II bomber crew, you flew for hours above an entire nation hoping to murder you while suspended in the air, huge, visible from far away, and vulnerable from every direction above and below as bullets and flak streamed out to puncture you. “Ghosts already,” that’s how historian Kevin Wilson described Word War II airmen. They expected to die because it always felt like the chances of surviving the next bombing run were about the same as running shirtless across a football field swarming with angry hornets and making it unharmed to the other side. You might make it across once, but if you kept running back and forth, eventually your luck would run out. Any advantage the mathematicians could provide, even a very small one, would make a big difference day after day, mission after mission.

As with the torpedo problem, the top brass explained what they knew, and the Panel presented the problem to Wald and his group. How, the Army Air Force asked, could they improve the odds of a bomber making it home? Military engineers explained to the statistician that they already knew the allied bombers needed more armor, but the ground crews couldn’t just cover the planes like tanks, not if they wanted them to take off. The operational commanders asked for help figuring out the best places to add what little protection they could. It was here that Wald prevented the military from falling prey to survivorship bias, an error in perception that could have turned the tide of the war if left unnoticed and uncorrected. See if you can spot it.

The military looked at the bombers that had returned from enemy territory. They recorded where those planes had taken the most damage. Over and over again, they saw the bullet holes tended to accumulate along the wings, around the tail gunner, and down the center of the body. Wings. Body. Tail gunner. Considering this information, where would you put the extra armor? Naturally, the commanders wanted to put the thicker protection where they could clearly see the most damage, where the holes clustered. But Wald said no, that would be precisely the wrong decision. Putting the armor there wouldn’t improve their chances at all. 

Do you understand why it was a foolish idea? The mistake, which Wald saw instantly, was that the holes showed where the planes were strongest. The holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still survive the flight home, Wald explained. After all, here they were, holes and all. It was the planes that weren’t there that needed extra protection, and they had needed it in places that these planes had not. The holes in the surviving planes actually revealed the locations that needed the least additional armor. Look at where the survivors are unharmed, he said, and that’s where these bombers are most vulnerable; that’s where the planes that didn’t make it back were hit.

Taking survivorship bias into account, Wald went ahead and worked out how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it was destroyed – engine, ailerons, pilot, stabilizers, etc. – and then through a tangle of complicated equations he showed the commanders how likely it was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced. Those calculations are still in use today.

1944 War Dept US Army Air Forces Training Film – Source: National Archives

The military had the best data available at the time, and the stakes could not have been higher, yet the top commanders still failed to see the flaws in their logic. Those planes would have been armored in vain had it not been for the intervention of a man trained to spot human error.

A question should be forming in the front of your brain at this point. If the top brass of the United States armed forces could make such a simple and dumb mistake while focused on avoiding simple and dumb mistakes, thanks to survivorship bias, does that mean survivorship bias is likely bungling many of your own day-to-day assumptions? The answer is, of course, yes. All the time.

Simply put, survivorship bias is your tendency to focus on survivors instead of whatever you would call a non-survivor depending on the situation. Sometimes that means you tend to focus on the living instead of the dead, or on winners instead of losers, or on successes instead of failures. In Wald’s problem, the military focused on the planes that made it home and almost made a terrible decision because they ignored the ones that got shot down.

It is easy to do. After any process that leaves behind survivors, the non-survivors are often destroyed or rendered mute or removed from your view. If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all.

You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other. If you are thinking about opening a restaurant because there are so many successful restaurants in your hometown, you are ignoring the fact the only successful restaurants survive to become examples. Maybe on average 90 percent of restaurants in your city fail in the first year. You can’t see all those failures because when they fail they also disappear from view. As Nassim Taleb writes in his book The Black Swan, “The cemetery of failed restaurants is very silent.” Of course the few that don’t fail in that deadly of an environment are wildly successful because only the very best and the very lucky can survive. All you are left with are super successes, and looking at them day after day you might think it’s a great business to get into when you are actually seeing evidence that you should avoid it.

Google’s Larry Page – Source: Fortune Magazine

Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. It’s an unavoidable tick, the desire to deconstruct success like a thieving magpie and pull away the shimmering bits. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning. The problem here is that you rarely take away from these inspirational figures advice on what not to do, on what you should avoid, and that’s because they don’t know. Information like that is lost along with the people who don’t make it out of bad situations or who don’t make it on the cover of business magazines – people who don’t get invited to speak at graduations and commencements and inaugurations. The actors who traveled from Louisiana to Los Angeles only to return to Louisiana after a few years don’t get to sit next to James Lipton and watch clips of their Oscar-winning performances as students eagerly gobble up their crumbs of wisdom. In short, the advice business is a monopoly run by survivors. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.” The things a great company like Microsoft or Google or Apple did right are like the planes with bullet holes in the wings. The companies that burned all the way to the ground after taking massive damage fade from memory. Before you emulate the history of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums it up like so, “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”

If you see your struggle this way, as partly a game of chance, then as Google Engineer Barnaby James writes on his blog, “skill will allow you to place more bets on the table, but it’s not a guarantee of success.” Thus, he warns, “beware advice from the successful.” Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we can’t go back in time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know if that business model is the source of the chain’s immense popularity or if something completely random and out of the control of the decision makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular example.

It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful people probably owe more to luck than anything else, but only if you see luck as some sort of magic. Take off those superstitious goggles for a moment, and consider this: the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. It isn’t a force, or grace from the gods, or an enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else. According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human beings consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman followed the lives of 400 subjects of all ages and professions. He found them after he placed ads in newspapers asking for people who thought of themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. He had them keep diaries and perform tests in addition to checking in on their lives with interviews and observations. In one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

Wiseman told Skeptical Inquirer magazine that he likened it to setting loose two people inside an apple orchard, each tasked with filling up their baskets as many times as possible. The unlucky person tends to go to the same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that person’s basket is always full. Change those apples to experiences, and imagine a small portion of those experiences lead to fame, fortune, riches, or some other form of happiness material or otherwise, and you can see that chance is not as terrifying as it first appears, you just need to learn how to approach it.

“The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.” – Richard Wiseman in an article written for Skeptical Inquirer

Survivorship bias also flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain. You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.

Here is an easy example. Many people believe old things represent a higher level of craftsmanship than do new things. It’s sort of a “they don’t make them like they used to” kind of assumption. You’ve owned cars that only lasted a few years before you had to start replacing them piece by piece, and, would you look at that, there goes another Volkswagon Beetle buzzing along like it just rolled off an assembly line. It’s survivorship bias at work. The Beetle or the Mustang or the El Camino or the VW Minibus are among a handful of models that survived in large enough numbers to become iconic classics. The hundreds of shitty car designs and millions of automobile corpses in junkyards around the world far outnumber the popular, well-maintained, successful, beloved survivors. According to Josh Clark at HowStuffWorks, most experts say that cars from the last two decades are far more reliable and safer than the cars of the 1950s and ‘60s, but plenty of people believe otherwise because of a few high-profile survivors. The examples that would disprove such assumptions are rusting out of sight. Do you see how it’s the same as Wald’s bombers? The Beetle survived, like the bombers that made it home, and it becomes a representative of 1960s cars because it remains visible. All the other cars that weren’t made in the millions and weren’t easy to maintain or were poorly designed are left out of the analysis because they are now removed from view, like the bombers that didn’t return.

Similarly, photographer Mike Johnston explains on his blog that the artwork that leaps from memory when someone mentions a decade like the 1920s or a movement like Baroque is usually made up of things that do not suck. Your sense of a past era tends to be informed by paintings and literature and drama that are not crap, even though at any given moment pop culture is filled with more crap than masterpieces. Why? It isn’t because people were better artists back in the day. It is because the good stuff survives, and the bad stuff is forgotten. So over time, you end up with skewed ideas of past eras. You think the artists of antiquity were amazing in the same way you associate the music of past decades with the songs that survived long enough to get into your ears. The movies about Vietnam never seem include in their soundtracks the songs that sucked.

“I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it’s just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn’t mean all of them were.” – Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer

You succumb to survivorship bias because you are innately terrible with statistics. For instance, if you seek advice from a very old person about how to become very old, the only person who can provide you an answer is a person who is not dead. The people who made the poor health choices you should avoid are now resting in the earth and can’t tell you about those bad choices anymore. That’s why it’s difficult not to furrow your brow and wonder why you keep paying for a gym membership when Willard Scott showcases the birthday of a 110-year-old woman who claims the source of her longevity is a daily regimen of cigarillos, cheese sticks, and Wild Turkey cut with maple syrup and Robitussin. You miss that people like her represent a very small number of the living. They are on the thin end of a bell curve. There is a much larger pool of people who basically drank bacon grease for breakfast and didn’t live long enough to appear on television. Most people can’t chug bourbon and gravy for a lifetime and expect to become an octogenarian, but the unusually lucky handful who can tend to stand out precisely because they are alive and talking.

The mentalist Derren Brown once predicted he could flip a coin 10 times in a row and have it come up heads every time. He then dazzled UK television audiences by doing exactly that, flipping the coin into a bowl with only one cutaway shot for flair. How did he do it? He filmed himself flipping coins for nine hours until he got the result he wanted. He then edited out all the failures and presented the single success.

Advertisements for weight loss products and fitness regimes operate just like Derren Brown’s magic trick, by hiding the failures and letting your survivorship bias do the rest. “Those always use the most positive claims, the most outrageous examples to sell a product,” Phil Plait, an astronomer and leading voice in the skeptical movement, explained to me. “When these things don’t work for the vast majority of customers, you never hear about it, at least not from the seller.” The people who use the diet, or the product, or the pill, and fail to lose weight don’t get trotted out for photo shoots – only the successes do. That same phenomenon has become a problem in science publications, especially among the younger sciences like psychology, but it is now under repair. For far too long, studies that fizzled out or showed insignificant results have not been submitted for publication at the same level as studies that end up with positive results, or even worse, they’ve been rejected by prominent journals. Left unchecked, over time you end up with science journals that only present the survivors of the journal process – studies showing significance. Psychologists are calling it the File Drawer Effect. The studies that disprove or weaken the hypotheses of high-profile studies seem to get stuffed in the file drawer, so to speak. Many scientists are pushing for the widespread publication of replication, failure, and insignificance. Only then, they argue, will the science journals and the journalism that reports on them accurately describe the world being explored. Science above all will need to root out survivorship, but it won’t be easy. This particular bias is especially pernicious, said Plait, because it is almost invisible by definition. ”The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable. But if you don’t ask them, then by definition you can’t answer them.” He added. “It’s a pain, but reality can be a tough nut to crack.”

Failure to look for what is missing is a common shortcoming, not just within yourself but also within the institutions that surround you. A commenter at an Internet watering hole for introverts called the INTJForum explained it with this example: when a company performs a survey about job satisfaction the only people who can fill out that survey are people who still work at the company. Everyone who might have quit out of dissatisfaction is no longer around to explain why. Such data mining fails to capture the only thing it is designed to measure, but unless management is aware of survivorship bias things will continue to seem peachy on paper. In finance, this is a common pitfall. The economist Mark Klinedinst explained to me that mutual funds, companies that offer stock portfolios, routinely prune out underperforming investments. “When a mutual fund tells you, ‘The last five years we had 10 percent on average return,’ well, the companies that didn’t have high returns folded or were taken over by companies that were more lucky.” The health of the companies they offer isn’t an indication of the mutual fund’s skill at picking stocks, said Klinedinst, because they’ve deleted failures from their offerings. All you ever see are the successes. That’s true for many, many elements of life. Money experts who made great guesses in the past are considered soothsayers because their counterparts who made equally risky moves that failed nosedived into obscurity and are now no longer playing the game. Whole nations left standing after wars and economic struggles pump fists of nationalism assuming that their good outcomes resulted from wise decisions, but they can never know for sure.

“Let us suppose that a commander orders 20 men to invade an enemy bunker. This invasion leads to a complete destruction of the bunker and only one dead soldier from the 20 person team. An amazingly successful endeavor. Unless you are the one soldier who was shot through the head running up the hill. From his standpoint, rapidly ascending to the spirit world, it seems like a gigantic waste and a terrible order, but we will never hear his side of things. We will only hear from the guys who survived, how it was tough going until they made it over the rise. How it was sad to lose one guy, but they knew that they would make it. They just had a feeling. Of course, that one guy had that feeling to, until he felt nothing.” – Unknown author at http://www.spacetravelsacrime.com

If you spend your life only learning from survivors, buying books about successful people and poring over the history of companies that shook the planet, your knowledge of the world will be strongly biased and enormously incomplete. As best I can tell, here is the trick: When looking for advice, you should look for what not to do, for what is missing as Phil Plait suggested, but don’t expect to find it among the quotes and biographical records of people whose signals rose above the noise. They may have no idea how or if they lucked up. What you can’t see, and what they can’t see, is that the successful tend to make it more probable that unlikely events will happen to them while trying to steer themselves into the positive side of randomness. They stick with it, remaining open to better opportunities that may require abandoning their current paths, and that’s something you can start doing right now without reading a single self-help proverb, maxim, or aphorism. Also, keep in mind that those who fail rarely get paid for advice on how not to fail, which is too bad because despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.

Abraham Wald – Source: Prof. Konrad Jacobs

Before we depart, I’d like to mention Wald one more time. Like many of the others who joined the armed services to fight Hitler with numbers, Abraham Wald went down in history, but not for the bombers and bullet holes story. He is best remembered as the inventor of sequential analysis, another achievement he earned while working in the department of war math. He married Lucille Land in 1941. Two years later they had their first child, Betty, followed four years later by another they named Robert. Three years after that, at the top of his career and enjoying an exotic speaking tour, after saving the lives of thousands of people he would never meet, he and Lucille died in an airplane that crashed against the side of the Nilgiri mountains in India. Perhaps there is an irony to that, something about airplanes and odds and chance and luck, but it isn’t the interesting part of Wald’s story. His contributions to science are what survives his time on Earth and the parts of his tale that will endure.

In 1968, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying the application of mathematics in World War II “became recognized as an art” and the lessons learned by the mathematicians were later applied to business, science, industry, and management. They saved the world and then rebuilt it using the same tools each time – calculators and chalk.

In 1978, Allen Wallis, Director of SRG said of his team, “This was surely the most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized.” The bomber problem was just a side story for them, a funny anecdote that only surfaced in the 1980s as they all began to reminisce full time. When you think of how fascinating the story is, it makes you wonder about the stories we’ll never hear about those numerical soldiers because they never made it out of the war and into a journal, magazine, or book, and how that’s true of so much that’s important in life. All we know of the past passes through a million, million filters, and a great deal is never recorded or is tossed aside to make room for something more interesting or beautiful or audacious. All we will learn from history reaches us from the stories that, for whatever reason, survived.

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Scherer, Sina. Bias in psychology: Bring in all significant results. 1 June 2012. 15 2013 January <http://jeps.efpsa.org/blog/2012/06/01/falsification-of-previous-results/&gt;.

Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R. & Harris, P. (2000). The relationship between ‘luck’ and psi. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 94, 25-36.


Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Harris, P. & Joiner, R. (1996). On being lucky: The psychology and parapsychology of luck. European Journal of Parapsychology, 12, 35-43.

Tête, Annie. SciTech Tuesday: Abraham Wald, Seeing the Unseen. 13 November 2012. 15 January 2013 <http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/scitech-tuesday-abraham-wald-seeing-the-unseen/&gt;.

Unknown. Our National Survivor Bias. 13 December 2010. 15 January 2013 <http://spacetravelsacrime.blogspot.com/2010/12/our-national-survivor-bias.html&gt;.

Wallis, W. Allen. “The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 320-330.

—. “The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945: Rejoinder.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 334-335.

West, Walt. Examining Your Failures Can Lead to More Success: Beware Survivor Bias Mistakes. 7 April 2011. 15 January 2013 <http://www.practicemanagementacademy.com/2011/04/survivor-bias/>.

Wilson, Kevin. Men of Air: The Doomed Youth of Bomber Command. Orion, 2007.

Wiseman, Richard. “The Luck Factor.” The Magazine For Science And Reason May 2003.
Wolfowitz, J. “Abraham Wald, 1902-150.” The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23.1 (1952): 1-13.

Tornado Damage

My wife, Amanda, adjusts a photo in our roofless home.

We just moved back in after repairing the many tree-sized holes punched in our house by an asshole tornado a few months back. We were inside, on the floor of a hallway, as it crunched up and spat out the neighborhood. It went on to destroy more than 200 homes in our town.

Now that that is over, it means a bevy of new things are about to appear here: new articles, new podcasts, shirts, and a new book. 

I’m also happy to announce a new partnership with Big Think. I’ll be posting some new original content over there from time to time, and you’ll be able to get new episodes of the podcast there as well (when I finish putting the home studio back together). Check it out at here: link to Big Think

I’ll have details on the new book soon, but you can already preorder it here: link to preorder book

Also, this shirt (with and without the logo) and a few others will soon be available. I’ll be giving away some too.

I can’t wait to show you the new article I’m finishing up. See you then.

Contractors repair the spot where a tornado broke our house open

Complete quests for riches and glory to help herald the paperback release of You Are Not So Smart

Photo illustration of Graham Clark by Brad Clark

Below these words, you will find 10 quests, each offering a prize should you complete the challenges therein.

The You Are Not So Smart book was published and then released into the wild about a year ago. That means it is time for it transmutate into paperback form, and I’m proud to announce the paperback version is now on shelves just about everywhere books hide. Also, if you live in the UK or one of the many countries that buys books from UK marketplaces, you can now get the You Are Not So Smart book free of hassle with a new, dapper cover design.

To promote this wondrous occasion, I want to send you on some quests. Should you succeed, you will be handsomely rewarded. Some will be easy, and some will be trials of will and skill. Those proved worthy will be featured in a future posting. Here they are:

Quest the First

Tweet for a chance to receive a phrenology bust and a signed copy of the book.

Tweet about the book with a link back to here. Add @notsmartblog in your tweet. Should you herald the arrival of the new tome in this way, you will be placed in a drawing of lots for one of three phrenology busts and a signed copy of the book, and, of course, my deepest thanks.

(Each tweet counts as an entry. The drawing will be held one week hence by random number generator. Three winners each get a phrenology bust and a signed copy of the book. I will cross out this quest on that date.)

Quest the Second

Post on Facebook and get a signed copy of the book.

Share any post on this blog on your Facebook page with a note about the release of the paperback. The first 10 people to get more than 20 likes on their post will receive a signed copy of the book and a thoughtful nod of appreciation.

(Send a screenshot to david@youarenotsosmart.com. Limit: First 10 submitted. I will cross out this quest once it is completed.)

Quest the Third

Take a photo and receive a signed copy of the book.

Take a photo of the book on display in a bookstore or in the hands of a reader and post it to Instagram. Should you complete this quest, a random number generator will decide if you receive a signed copy of the book and a heartfelt missive.

(Share the link to david@youarenotsosmart.com with a note about where the photo was taken – Limit: First 20 chosen by a random number generator one week hence – I will cross out this quest on that date.)

Quest the Fourth

Find self delusion in the wild and receive a signed copy of the book.

Find a news item, article, blog post, opinion piece, tweet, or other Internet item from the last three months that is a perfect example of one of the topics from the blog. If you can pass such thing to me, you may be rewarded with a signed copy of the book and my deepest gratitude.

(Send a link to david@youarenotsosmart.com – Limit: First 10 chosen by a random number generator one week hence – I will cross out this quest on that date.)

Quest the Fifth

Get into an argument and earn a signed copy of the UK edition.

Get into an argument on the Internet that results in your opponent using a logical fallacy or illustrating a cognitive bias or a faulty heuristic. Show them the error of their ways. The first 10 to return with a screenshot and be selected at random will be showered in riches and heralded from the rooftops and receive a signed copy of the UK edition of the book.

(Send to david@youarenotsosmart.com – Limit: First 10 chosen by a random number generator one week hence – I will cross out this quest on that date.)

Quest the Sixth

Create a mixed drink and earn a plush neuron and a signed copy of the UK edition.

Create a mixed drink named after any topic ever covered on the blog, the podcast, or the book. Explain why the drink is named after that topic, take photos, and provide detailed instructions on how to make it. Videos are also welcomed. Should you prevail and be selected at random, you will receive a plush neuron and a signed copy of the UK edition of the book.

(Send to david@youarenotsosmart.com – Limit: First 3 chosen by a random number generator one week hence – I will cross out this quest on that date.)

Quest the Seventh

Edify a blowhard, receive a useless box and a signed copy of the book.

Photograph or film yourself politely handing a copy of the book to a famous politician or a well-known pundit. Be nice. Should you succeed, you will receive a useless box and a signed copy of the book.

(Send to david@youarenotsosmart.com - Limit: First 3 submitted – I will cross out this quest when it is completed.)

Quest the Eighth

Record a marshmallow experiment, receive a Sigmund Freud puppet and signed book.

Shoot a video of a human under five-years-old passing or failing the marshmallow test I wrote about in the post about procrastination. Should you capture such an event and be selected at random, you will receive a Sigmund Freud finger puppet and couch and a signed copy of the book.

(Send YouTube video link to david@youarenotsosmart.com - Limit: First 3 chosen by a random number generator one week hence – I will cross out this quest on that date.)

Quest the Ninth

Create beautiful music yon bard, and receive music, the audiobook, and a signed book in return.

Record a song I can use as background music on the podcast – no singing. Should you return with such an item, you will receive a signed copy of the book, an album download for Helena Jesele, an album download for Caroline Crawford, a $20 gift card to iTunes, the audiobook version of the book, and a signed copy of the book.

(Send to david@youarenotsosmart.com – Limit: My favorite out of all submitted one month hence. I will cross out this quest on that date.)

Quest the Tenth

Read the book in a famous location, receive a useless box, a phrenology head, a plush neuron, a Sigmund Freud puppet, and signed copies of the US, UK, German and Korean editions of the book.

Travel to the Freud museum in London and take a photograph of yourself reading the book…near…Freud’s couch which I wrote about in the post on ego depletion, or travel to the Capilano Suspension Bridge and photograph yourself reading the book in the middle of the bridge I wrote about in the post on the misattribution of arousal. If you accomplish either feat, you will receive a useless box, a phrenology head, a plush neuron, a Sigmund Freud puppet, and signed copies of the US, UK, German and Korean editions of the book.

(Send photo to david@youarenotsosmart.com - Limit: One chosen by a random number generator one week hence – I will cross out this quest on that date. Also, ask permission and don’t do anything illegal.)

Other book stuff:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes |IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Audible

Sample Chapter | Kindlegraph | Bookplates

Trailer One | Trailer Two

YANSS Podcast – Episode Five

The Topic: Selling Out

The Guest: Andrew Potter

The Episode: Download - iTunes - Stitcher - RSS - Soundcloud

Andrew Potter is the guest on this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. He wrote the book The Authenticity Hoax and co wrote The Rebel Sell.

Both books present an upside-down view of the quest to avoid the mainstream and seek out the authentic. The books help explain how it came to be that so many people seem concerned about selling out both as a consumer and a producer. Most interesting though is Potter’s assertion that there really is no such thing as authenticity when you get right down to it. As he puts it, “there could never be an authenticity detector we could wave at something, like the security guards checking you at the airport.” Oh, and he says countercultures actually create the mainstream they rebel against.

According to Potter, a giant portion of modern people living in industrialized Western nations eventually notice just how much consumerism and conformity intrudes on their daily lives, and they seek release. The average person watching an interview of a reality television star on a 24-news-network following a musical performance by the latest winner of America’s Top Pawn Wife after a breakdown of what is trending on YouTube while commenting on an Instagram photo on Facebook on an iPad on a treadmill in the gym between advertisements for antidepressants and movies about mall cops who befriend talking ferrets will understandably feel a bit overwhelmed from time to time. The urge to walk away from all of that and get lost in the most obscure thing you can find, the most distant and untouched landscape you can visit, the least processed or marketed product you can put in your body, is strong and understandable and healthy, but Potter says it is ultimately futile.

For this segment of society “the search for the authentic is positioned as the most pressing quest of our age,” writes Potter. This urge leads to those things that have earned the most anti-mainstream adjectives like local, organic, artisan, indie, all natural, underground, sustainable, free trade, slow, holistic, green, and so on. Yet, that ideology, that quest for the authentic, is the very thing that causes the world to seem so unreal and staged. People can’t stop themselves from competing for status. It is branded into the side of the brain before you are born. As a primate, status hierarchies are a part of life, and when you remove yourself from the competition in the mainstream you just join the competition in the counterculture. As long as there are clusters of people bent on avoiding what is most popular, within those clusters people will compete for status through conspicuous consumption of art and fashion, music and movies, furniture and gadgets, signaling to insiders the quality of their taste or the ingenuity of their search for the authentic, and signaling to the outsiders that they are not one of them. Whether you are a Juggalo in Kentucky or a Kogal in Tokyo, the internal affairs cool police are always on the prowl for posers.

Potter explains that, yes, modern culture can be hollow and self-absorbed and obsessed with consumption, but the competitive pressure to be more real, more authentic, and less conformist is no less exhausting or misguided. It’s a fascinating and challenging point of view. I think you’ll like the interview.

After the interview, as in every episode, I read a bit of self delusion news and taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of the YANSS book (now available in the UK!), and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Michael Buswell who submitted a recipe for Chewbacca’s Chocolate Chip Vegan Cookies. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.

Links and Sources:

Download - iTunes - Stitcher - RSS - Soundcloud

The YANSS Pinterest Page

The YANSS article on selling out

The article on hyperactivity mentioned in the podcast

The Oswalt/Cross debacle

The Authenticity Hoax

Stuff White People Like

Portlandia