More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious
It’s like the expression “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Ultimately, to be wrong less, you also need to be testing your assumptions in the real world, a process known as de-risking. There is risk that one or more of your assumptions are untrue, and so the conclusions you reach could also be false.
Ockham’s razor helps here.
You can be nudged in a direction by a subtle word choice or other environmental cues. Restaurants will nudge you by highlighting certain dishes on menu inserts, by having servers verbally describe specials,
How to nudge users to buy something.
Because of availability bias, you’re likely to click on things you’re already familiar with, and so Google, Facebook, and many other companies tend to show you more of what they think you already know and like. Since there are only so many items they can show you—only so many links on page one of the search results—they therefore filter out links they think you are unlikely to click on, such as opposing viewpoints, effectively placing you in a bubble.
How social media place you in a bubble
In the run-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election and again in 2018, the search engine DuckDuckGo (founded by Gabriel) conducted studies where individuals searched on Google for the same political topics, such as gun control and climate change. It discovered that people got significantly different results, personalized to them, when searching for the same topics at the same time. This happened even when they were signed out and in so-called incognito mode. Many people don’t realize that they are getting tailored results based on what a mathematical algorithm thinks would increase their
...more
When you put many similar filter bubbles together, you get echo chambers, where the same ideas seem to bounce around the same groups of people, echoing around the collective chambers of these connected filter bubbles.
Another way of giving people the benefit of the doubt for their behavior is called Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness
Hanlon’s razor is especially useful for navigating connections in the virtual world. For example, we have all misread situations online. Since the signals of body language and voice intonation are missing, harmless lines of text can be read in a negative way.
The veil of ignorance encourages you to empathize with people across a variety of circumstances, so that you can make better moral judgments.
Learned helplessness can be overcome when animals or people see that their actions can make a difference, that they aren’t actually helpless.
Confirmation bias is so hard to overcome that there is a related model called the backfire effect that describes the phenomenon of digging in further on a position when faced with clear evidence that disproves it. In other words, it often backfires when people try to change your mind with facts and figures, having the opposite effect on you than it should; you become more entrenched in the original, incorrect position, not less.
The essence of thinking gray is this: don’t form an opinion about an important matter until you’ve heard all the relevant facts and arguments, or until circumstances force you to form an opinion without recourse to all the facts (which happens occasionally, but much less frequently than one might imagine). F. Scott Fitzgerald once described something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function.
This is extremely difficult but to be a good decision maker, I must have the courage to hold 2 contrary beliefs until I hear all information to make a decision.
As Feynman warned Caltech graduates in 1974: “You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” KEY TAKEAWAYS
Consider the adage “You are what you eat.” You need to take in a
variety of foods to be a healthy person.
As reported by The New York Times on November 29, 2018, more people died from drug overdoses in 2017 than from HIV/AIDS, car crashes, or gun deaths in the years of their respective peaks.
For example, in Italy, a common phrase is used to describe the current cultural norm around paying taxes: “Only fools pay.” Though Italy has been actively fighting tax evasion in the past decade, this pervasive cultural norm of tax avoidance took hold over a longer period and is proving hard to reverse.
Developed nations have major tax issues.
Coase showed that an externality can be internalized efficiently without further need for intervention (that is, without a government or other authority regulating the externality) if the following conditions are met: Well-defined property rights Rational actors Low transaction costs
How to avoid negative externalities? - Solution in Coase Theorem.
