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Henry Ford famously despised accountants – the Ford Motor Company was never audited while he had control of it.
The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.
real life, most things aren’t logical – they are psycho-logical.
There are often two reasons behind people’s behaviour: the ostensibly logical reason, and the real reason.
to reach intelligent answers, you often need to ask really dumb questions.
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.
‘my data disagree with your anecdotes’.
It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past.
a single rogue variable or a ‘black swan’ event can throw the most perfectly calibrated model into chaos.
The Nobel Prize-winning behavioural scientist Richard Thaler said, ‘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.’
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.
Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak.
If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.
‘privileging the hypothesis’.
When everyone agrees with 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. These are two entirely different things, and can happen in either order. Scientific progress is not a one-way street.
Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.fn7
around 90 per cent of people have no idea what sort of aircraft they are travelling on or how a jet engine works but will infer a great deal about the safety and quality of the experience offered by an airline from the care and attention it pays to on-board snacks.
it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.
in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.
Scarcity and ubiquity can both matter, depending on the context.
People are highly contradictory. The situation or place in which we find ourselves may completely change our perception and judgement.
‘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.’
you can never be fired for being logical. If your reasoning is sound and unimaginative, even if you fail, it is unlikely you will attract much blame. It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.
There are five main reasons why we have evolved to behave in seemingly illogical ways, and they conveniently all begin with the letter S.fn1 They are: Signalling, Subconscious hacking, Satisficing and Psychophysics.
evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, explains that we do not have full access to the reasons behind our decision-making because, in evolutionary terms, we are better off not knowing; we have evolved to deceive ourselves, in order that we are better at deceiving others.
humans may be descended from ancestors who were better at the concealment of their true motives. It is not enough to conceal them from others – to be really convincing, you also have to conceal them from yourself.
‘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.’
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.
In many ways it is the very inefficiency of premium foods that
provide us with a wider field of view.
People may be accurate commentators on their emotional state, but the causes of that emotional state (in this case, uncertainty) are often a complete mystery to them.
often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.
Upton Sinclair once remarked, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’
regardless of what we say, we are much bothered by the uncertainty of waiting than by the duration of a wait.
You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame.
they are a more efficient source of protein than pigs; chickens require 3,500 litres of water to produce one kilo of meat, pigs require 6,000.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks, ‘the way a question is phrased is itself information’.
‘A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE IS WORTH 80 IQ POINTS’
because the number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used.
In maths, 10 x 1 is always the same as 1 x 10, but in real life, it rarely is. You can trick ten people once, but it’s much harder to trick one person ten times.fn2
our tax system assumes that ten people who earn £70,000 for one year of their life should be taxed the same amount as one person who earns £70,000 for ten consecutive years, yet I have never heard anyone question this – is it another example of bad maths?
When hiring, we should understand that unconscious motivation and rational good sense overlap, but they do not completely coincide.
The quandary is that you can either create a fairer, more equitable society, with opportunities for all but where luck plays a significant role, or you can create a society which maintains the illusion of complete and non-random fairness, yet where opportunities are open to only a few
anyone can easily build a career on a single eccentric talent, if it is cunningly deployed.
As I always advise young people, ‘Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at and be quite good at them.’ Complementary talent is far more valuable than conformist talent.
Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes.
