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February 26 - March 21, 2022
The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.
we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things. But in real life, most things aren’t logical – they are psycho-logical.
This freedom is much more valuable than we realise, because to reach intelligent answers, you often need to ask really dumb questions.
Human behaviour is an enigma. Learn to crack the code.
To avoid stupid mistakes, learn to be slightly silly.
Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.
More data leads to better decisions. Except when it doesn’t.
It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past.
We could never have evolved to be rational – it makes you weak.
Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.
A rational leader suggests changing course to avoid a storm. An irrational one can change the weather.
If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.
‘privileging the hypothesis’.
Be careful before calling something nonsense.
‘At the federal level I am a Libertarian. At the state level, I am a Republican. At the town level, I am a Democrat. In my family I am a socialist. And with my dog I am a Marxist – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’
‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing,’ as Pascal
‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’
‘Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.’
Evolution does not care about objectivity – it only cares about fitness.
For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.
‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’
You don’t need reasons to be rational.
In trying to encourage rational behaviour, don’t confine yourself to rational arguments.
Logic should be a tool, not a rule.
To put it crudely, when you multiply bullshit with bullshit, you don’t get a bit more bullshit – you get bullshit squared.
A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident.
We should test counterintuitive things – because no one else will.
Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need. Management attention is instead largely directed towards the invention of plausible-sounding efficiency narratives to satisfy financial analysts, many of whom know nothing about the businesses they claim to analyse, beyond what they can read on a spreadsheet.
In psychology these laws do not apply: one plus one can equal three.
In maths it is a rule that 2 + 2 = 4. In psychology, 2 + 2 can equal more or less than 4. It’s up to you.
We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.
Never forget this: the nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience.
The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.
Branding isn’t just something to add to great products – it’s essential to their existence.
So, do you want the smoke and mirrors that help the environment, or the smoke and mirrors that don’t?
Behaviour comes first; attitude changes to keep up.
People seem to like choice for its own sake.
Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.
This is not irrationality – it is second-order social intelligence applied to an uncertain world. By using a simple economic model with a narrow view of human motivation, the neo-liberal project has become a threat to the human imagination.
If we could resist the urge to be logical just some of the time, and devote that time instead to the pursuit of alchemy, what might we discover?
