Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck > Status Update

" the moral is implicit in the story, but the story is not implicit in the moral" A great answer to the question 'Why literature?'.

"The audience may actually improve your idea...Or the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others...Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn't whether people mimic our exact words, it's whether we achieve our goals."

"The more the training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be."

"Photocopiers are perhaps the most complex machines that most of us will ever use. What other everyday machine combines optical, mechanical, chemical and electrical technologies?" And ever since CELTA I have used one every working day :)

"The second model [of decision making] is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this situation?"

"The distance from New York to Los Angeles is much more tangible. (Though, frankly, it's still far from tangible...."" Thus illustrating that the curse of knowledge is a relative thing.

"The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities." - Equivocation over 'authority'; sometimes the people in authority don't have any authority.

"We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like." A refinement of Aristotle's ethos, or not the whole story?

"Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete." Languages often organise the 'concrete' in different ways. Concrete/Abstract is contestable?

"...by converting abstract blobs on a map to a tangible landscape." Actually they gave it a name: nominalisation is usually a case of more abstraction not less.