Latest Articles
- Making Good Citizenship Fun — Richard Thaler
- Interesting article by Richard Thaler on encouraging good citizenship by making the desired behavior more fun: Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued. Of course you can simply pay people for doing the right thing, but if the [...] Read more – ‘Making Good Citizenship Fun — Richard Thaler’.
- Naturalistic v. Idealistic Approaches to Organizational Planning
- Idealistic approaches, however well motivated, rely on top down determination of what is right. In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not [...] Read more – ‘Naturalistic v. Idealistic Approaches to Organizational Planning’.
- The Law of Competing Standards
- In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, an official named Gresham observed that where different metals were in circulation as coinage and some were better than others of the same nominal value, the coins made of the inferior metal tended to drive the better out of circulation. The better coins were either hoarded or melted down [...] Read more – ‘The Law of Competing Standards’.
- Habits
- William James famously wrote “Ninety-nine hundredths of our activity is purely automatic. All of our life is nothing but a mass of habits.” James, according to Jonah Lehrer writing in the WSJ, “was pointing out that, though we give habits little thought, they define our lives: how much we eat, save or spend, how often [...] Read more – ‘Habits’.
- The Online Disinhibition Effect: Why We Tell All Over The Internet
- Matt Ridley with an excellent column in the weekend Wall Street Journal on why we feel uncomfortable about using honesty when face to face with other people but seem to have no problem being brutally honest over the net. In many monkeys and apes, face-to-face contact is essentially antagonistic. Staring is a threat. A baboon [...] Read more – ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect: Why We Tell All Over The Internet’.
- The Balance Wheel of Civilization
- Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization. Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas. — My Life and Work Read more – ‘The Balance Wheel of Civilization’.
- Scientifically Proven Ways to Study Better
- …Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading [...] Read more – ‘Scientifically Proven Ways to Study Better’.
- Mental Model: Prisoners’ Dilemma
- The prisoners’ dilemma is the best known strategy game in social science. The game shows why two entities might not cooperate even when it appears in their best (rational) interest to do so. What is rational for the individual in certain circumstances is not rational for the group — that is, pursuing a strategy that [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Prisoners’ Dilemma’.
- The Most Dangerous Place
- Justin Landis with an an interesting blog post he wrote in response to a Freakonomics podcast “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?” The highlight: [T]hose of us who live in the business world are certainly incentivized to focus on what we know over what we don’t know. And whether we’re talking about [...] Read more – ‘The Most Dangerous Place’.
- Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb
- Free The Animal: Lose Weight & Fat With The Paleo Diet (5 stars) A charming primer on the paleo idea, with an illustration through the authors own life. I read it in one sitting. Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (5 stars) This is a great synthesis of the modularity [...] Read more – ‘Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb’.