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The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
Don’t design for average.
It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else i...
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The nature of our attention affects the nature of...
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A flower is simply a weed with an adver...
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The problem with logic is that it kil...
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A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So ...
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Test counterintuitive things only because no...
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Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf w...
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Dare to be t...
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If there were a logical answer, we would ...
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What I’m fairly sure nobody would say is this: ‘Hey, let’s try marketing a really expensive drink, that comes in a tiny can … and that tastes kind of disgusting.’ Yet that is exactly what one company did.
The models that dominate all human decision-making today are duly heavy on simplistic logic, and light on magic
the French are astonishingly productive on the rare occasion they are not on holiday;
But the economy is not a machine – it is a highly complex system. Machines don’t allow for magic, but complex systems do.
We should never forget that our need for logic and certainty brings costs as well as benefits. The need to appear scientific in our methodology may prevent us from considering other, less logical and more magical solutions, which can be cheap, fast-acting and effective.
The mythical ‘butterfly effect’ does exist, but we don’t spend enough time butterfly hunting.
it is difficult for a company, or indeed a government, to request a budget for the pursuit of such magical solutions, because a business case has to look logical.
Interestingly, the likes of Steve Jobs, James Dyson, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel often seem certifiably bonkers;
The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.
if we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things.
Human behaviour is an enigma. Learn to crack the code.
To avoid stupid mistakes, learn to be slightly silly.
Most people spend their time at work trying to look intelligent, and for the last fifty years or more, people have tried to look intelligent by trying to look like scientists;
Rather than being designed to be optimal, it has evolved to be useful.
Logic is what makes a successful engineer or mathematician, but psycho-logic is what has made us a successful breed of monkey, that has survived and flourished over time.
The trick to being an alchemist lies not in understanding universal laws, but in spotting the many instances where those laws do not apply.
The bicycle may seem a strange inclusion here: however, although humans can learn how to ride bicycles quite easily, physicists still cannot fully understand how bicycles work. Seriously. The bicycle evolved by trial and error more than by intentional design.
Similarly, if you expose every one of the world’s problems to ostensibly logical solutions, those that can easily be solved by logic will rapidly disappear, and all that will be left are the ones that are logic-proof – those where, for whatever reason, the logical answer does not work. Most political, business, foreign policy and, I strongly suspect, marital problems seem to be of this type.
you could make equally strong cases that the Remain campaign in Britain and Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the American presidency failed because of the clueless, hyper-rational behaviour of overeducated advisors, who threw away huge natural advantages.
Notice that Winston Churchill did not urge us to fight the Second World War ‘in order to regain access to key export markets’.
More data leads to better decisions. Except when it doesn’t.
dismissing another suggestion with the smug ‘my data disagree with your anecdotes’.
The need to rely on data can also blind you to important facts that lie outside your model.
It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past.
no one has spent enough time asking whether an overreliance on mathematical models of decision-making might be to blame for the fact that in each case the clear favourite blew it.
Highly educated people don’t merely use logic; it is part of their identity.
‘As a general rule the US Government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.’
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.
Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational.
If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.
the single worst thing that can happen in a criminal investigation is for everyone involved to become fixated on the same theory, because one false assumption shared by everyone can undermine the entire investigation. There’s a name for this – it’s called ‘privileging the hypothesis’.
My problem with Marxism is that it makes too much sense.
There are two separate forms of scientific enquiry – the discovery of what works and the explanation and understanding of why it works.
Yet policy and business decisions are overwhelmingly based on a ‘reason first, discovery later’ methodology, which seems wasteful in the extreme.
Perhaps a plausible ‘why’ should not be a pre-requisite in deciding a ‘what’,
The record of science in some ways casts doubt on a scientific approach to problem solving.
And what is the single most important finding of the advertising industry? Perhaps it is that ‘advertisements featuring cute animals tend to be more successful than ads that don’t’.
