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To this day, on every single Sunday in every single market, this company still buys newspaper advertising—even though the only real piece of feedback they ever got is that the ads don’t work.
But experimentation of this sort is regrettably rare in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, government, and elsewhere. Why? One reason is tradition. In our experience, many institutions are used to making decisions based on some murky blend of gut instinct, moral compass, and whatever the previous decision maker did.
marketing focus group—a small number of handpicked volunteers in an artificial environment who dutifully carry out the tasks requested by the person in charge. Lab experiments are invaluable in the hard sciences, in part because neutrinos and monads don’t change their behavior when they are being watched; but humans do.
Can you guess which two decanters they judged as most different from each other? Decanters 1 and 4—which had been poured from the exact same bottle!
“My hypothesis,” he says, “was that the $250 fee was really the functional part of the application.” So he sent off the check, the application, and his wine list. Not long after, the answering machine at his fake restaurant in Milan received a real call from Wine Spectator in New York. He had won an Award of Excellence! The magazine also asked “if you might have an interest in publicizing your award with an ad in the upcoming issue.” This led Goldstein to conclude that “the entire awards program was really just an advertising scheme.”
Just Like the better business bureau or yelp
pay attention to what other people say and, if their views resonate with us, we slide our perception atop theirs. Furthermore, we tend to focus on the part of a problem that bothers us. Maybe you hate the idea of substandard schools because your grandmother was a teacher and she seemed so much more devoted to education than today’s teachers. To you, it is obvious that schools are failing because there are too many bad teachers. Let’s consider
teacher quality has fallen since your grandmother’s day, in part because smart women now have so many more job options. Furthermore, in some countries—Finland and Singapore and South Korea, for instance—future schoolteachers are recruited from the best college-bound students, whereas a teacher in the United States is more likely to come from the bottom half of her class.
“What’s wrong with our schools?” when in reality, the question might be better phrased as “Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?” When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.
Maybe we are asking too much of the schools and too little of our parents and kids? Here is the broader point: whatever problem you’re trying to solve, make sure you’re not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.
Because poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat,” the economist Amartya Sen wrote in his landmark book Poverty and Famines. “It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” In countries whose political and economic institutions are built to serve the appetites of a corrupt few rather than the multitudes, food is routinely withheld from the people who need it most.
It is a lot easier to argue about cops and prisons and gun laws than the thorny question of what makes a parent fit to raise a child. But if you want to have a worthwhile conversation about crime, it makes sense to start by talking about the benefits of good, loving parents who give their children a chance to lead safe and productive lives. That may not be a simple conversation.
American blacks are about 50 percent more likely to have hypertension than American whites. Again, this could be due to differences like diet and income. So what did the hypertension rates of other black populations look like? Fryer found that among Caribbean blacks—another population brought from Africa as slaves—hypertension rates were also elevated. But he noted that blacks who still live in Africa are statistically indistinguishable from whites in America. The evidence was hardly conclusive, but Fryer was convinced that the selection mechanism of the slave trade could be a long-lasting
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Fresh medical research may prove that the salt-sensitivity theory isn’t even right. But if it is, even in small measure, the potential benefits are huge. “There’s something that can be done,” Fryer says. “A diuretic
By one measure, a pure high-nutrition diet can cost as much as ten times more than a pure junk-food diet.
Check out this quote. #obesityepidemic
we’ll say what we think other people want to hear and then, in private, do what we want. In economics, these are known as declared preferences and revealed preferences, and there is often a hefty gap between the two.
in some folks the gap rivals the Grand Canyon
Smile Train changed its message: Hey, we know it’s a hassle to get eighteen letters a year. You think we like having to send out that many? But we’re all in this fight together, so why don’t you send us a few bucks and we can be done with it?
heads up @SalvationArmy @GreenPeace @KPCC and more there is a better model
What kind of company would offer a new employee $2,000 to not work? A clever company. “It’s really putting the employee in the position of ‘Do you care more about money or do you care more about this culture and the company?’” says Tony Hsieh, the company’s CEO. “And if they care more about the easy money, then we probably aren’t the right fit for them.”
The CCP’s general mission is to determine how the public forms its views on touchy subjects like gun laws, nanotechnology, and date rape. In the case of global warming, CCP began with the possible explanation that the public just doesn’t think climate scientists know what they’re talking about.
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Hate this one
True or false: The center of the earth is very hot.
Check out this quote.
Don’t pretend your argument is perfect. Show us a “perfect” solution and we’ll show you our pet unicorn.
#unicorn
90 percent of the world’s 1.2 million traffic deaths each year—yes, 1.2 million deaths, every year!—are the result of driver error, the driverless car may be one of the biggest lifesavers in recent history.
the result of human error #driverlesscar
Acknowledge the strengths of your opponent’s argument.
Check out this quote.
Let’s say the driverless car would lower the death toll by 20 percent. That would save 240,000 lives around the world every year, including 36,000 children.
including 36,000 children
During this period of zero airline deaths, more than 140,000 Americans died in traffic crashes.
#driverlesscar
U.S. Congress, which in recent years has operated less like a legislative body than a deranged flock of summer campers locked in an endless color war.
in the human psyche, “bad is stronger than good.” This means that negative events—vicious crimes, horrible accidents, and sundry dramatic evils—make an outsize impression on our memories.
an ever-growing body of evidence suggests that eating fat is pretty good for us, at least certain types of fat and in moderation; and (2) when people stopped eating fat, it wasn’t as if they instead ate nothing; they began to consume more sugar and more carbohydrates that the body turns into sugar—and which, the evidence suggests, is a huge contributor to obesity.
Stories also appeal to the narcissist in all of us. As a story unspools, with its cast of characters moving through time and making decisions, we inevitably put ourselves in their shoes. Yes, I would have done that too! or No no no, I never would have made that decision!
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
A premortem tries to find out what might go wrong before it’s too late.
Now they each write down the exact reasons for its failure. Klein has found the premortem can help flush out the flaws or doubts in a project that no one had been willing to speak aloud. This suggests one way to make a premortem even more useful: offer anonymity.
