3 sections

Obsessive Theories,
Predictions
ways of
and minor organizing
we make
geniuses about people
experience.
 Part 1:
Obsessive, Pioneers,
And other varieties
Of minor genius
“To a warm horseradish, the world
Is horseradish”
 The Pitchman
Ron POPEIL and the conquest of the American kitchen

• How do you persuade people to disrupt their lives?

 You have to explain the invention to customers-not once or twice but three or
four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how
it works, and make them follow your hands, and then tell them how precisely
how it fits into their routine, and finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that,
revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.

• In every respect the design of the product must support the transparency and
effectiveness of its performance during a demonstration-the better it looks
onstage, the easier it is for the pitchman to go into the turn and ask for the
money.
 The Ketchup Conundrum
Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?

• The boundaries of taste and custom are not fixed: That just because mustard
had always been yellow didn’t mean that consumers would use only yellow
mustard.

• People don’t know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist.
• There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate:
 Salty.
 Sweet.
 Sour.
 Bitter.
 Umami.

• Our receptors for sweet and salty first appear at the tip of the tongue, along the
sides, sour receptors seem the strongest, and the back of the tongue exists umami
and bitter receptors.
 Blowing Up
How Nassim TALEB turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy

• You never know whether one day your luck would turn and it would all be
washed away.

• In the market, unlike in the physical universe, the rules of the game can be
changed.

• David HUME: “ No amount of observations of white swans can allow the

inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black
swan is sufficient to refute the conclusion”.

• We’re more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse
when it comes to our gains. That’s why we like small daily winning in the stock
market, even if that requires that we risk losing everything in a crash.
 True colors
Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America

• It’s about the relationship we have to the products we buy, and about the slow
realization among advertisers that unless they understood the psychological
particulars of that relationship-unless they could dignify the transactions of
everybody life by granting them meaning-they could not hope to reach the
modern consumer.

• All of us, when it comes to constructing the sense of self, borrow bits and
pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us – over-
the-counter ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our
identities. Our religion matters, the music we listen to matters, the clothes we
wear matter, the food we eat matters - and our brand of hair dye matters, too.
 What the dog saw
Cesar MILLAN and the movements of mastery
• Dogs are student of human movement. “Primates are very good at using the
cues of the same species. Dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing
something very human, which is sharing information about something that
someone else might actually want”. Dog’s aren’t smarter than chimps; they just
have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans.
Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis
ball.” A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward can be seen
as aggressive; backward-even a quarter of an inch-means nonthreatening. It
means you’ve relinquished, an intention movement to proceed forward. Cock
your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight
and he’ll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared,
rather than slumped, can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation
and igniting it. They are looking at your eyes and where your eyes are looking,
and what our eyes look like. A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high
arousal and aggression in a dog. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to
how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a
big clue for them with each others. They pay a tremendous amount of attention
to where our arms go.
 Part 2:

Theories, Predictions, and

diagnosis
“It was like driving down an interstate looking
through a soda straw”
 Open secrets
Enron, Intelligence, and the perils of too much information

• Puzzles: We don’t have enough information. Mysteries require judgments and

the assessments of uncertainty, and the hard parts is not that we have too little
information but that we have too much. Sometimes the information we’ve been
given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense
about what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be
answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.
Puzzles are transmitter-dependent; they turn on what we are
told. Mysteries are “receiver-dependent”; they turn on the
skills of the listener. Mysteries demand experience and insight.
 Million-Dollar Murray
Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.

• Power law distribution: All the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.
Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our
principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both. We struggle so much
with problems centered on a few hard cases.
 The picture problem
Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking.

• You can build a high-tech camera capable of taking pictures in the middle of
the night, in other words, but the system works only if the camera is pointed in
the right place, and even then the pictures are not self-explanatory. They need to
be interpreted, and the human task of interpretation is often a bigger obstacle
than the technical task of picture taking. Pictures promise to clarify but often
confuse. Is it possible that we place too much faith in pictures? Seeing a problem
and understanding it, then, are two different things. Mammogram delivers
information without true understanding. While a picture is a good start, if you
really want to know what you’re looking at, you probably need more than a
picture.
 Something borrowed
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?

• “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference
between a sin and a symptom.

• Creative property: it has many lives – the newspaper arrives at our door, it
becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the
time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they
came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of
the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of
influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth
and an eternal life.
 Connecting the dots
The paradoxes of intelligence reform

• What is clear in hindsight is rarely clear before the fact.

• “creeping determinism”: The sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what
has happened was actually inevitable, is that it turns unexpected events into
expected events. The second, and perhaps more serious, consequence of
creeping determinism: in our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems
of the past, we end up creating new problems for the future.

• Useless information is vastly more plentiful than useful information.

Information about enemy intentions tends to be short on detail. And information
that’s rich in detail tends to be short on intentions.
 The art of failure
Why some people choke and others panic

• Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Choking describes a very

specific kind of failure. We have two patterns of learning:

 Explicit learning.
 Implicit learning: You’ll learn a sequence unconsciously. It takes place outside
the awareness. These two learning systems are quite separate, based in different
parts of the brain. When you are first taught something, you think it through in a
very deliberate, mechanical manner. But as you get better, the implicit system
takes over: you start without thinking. The basal ganglia, where implicit learning
partially resides, are concerned with force and timing, and when that system
kicks in, you begin to develop touch and accuracy. Under conditions of stress,
however, the explicit system sometimes takes over. That’s what it means to
choke. Experts seem like a different person - acting with a slow, cautious
deliberation of a beginner - because, in a sense, they are beginner again.
 The art of failure
Why some people choke and others panic

• Panic is something else altogether. It causes perception narrowing. Panic is the

opposite of chocking. Chocking is about thinking too much. Panic is about
thinking too little. Chocking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to
instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart. Panicking is
conventional failure, of the sort we tacitly understand. Performance ought to
improve with experience, and the pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can
overcome. But chocking makes little intuitive sense. If panicking is conventional
failure, chocking is paradoxical failure.

• Stress wipes out short-term memory. People with lots of experience tend not to
panic, because when the stress suppresses their short-term memory they still
have some residue of experience to draw on.
 The art of failure
Why some people choke and others panic

• “Stereotype threat”: When black students are put into a situation where
they are directly confronted with a stereotype about their group – in this case one
having to do with intelligence – the resulting pressure causes their performance
to suffer. Only people who care about how well they perform ever feel the
pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure – to work harder
and take the test more seriously – would only make the problem worse.
Chocking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more
with the situation in which the performance occurs. We have to learn that
sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but
the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign
not of a poor student but of a good one.
 Blowup
Who can be blamed for a disaster like the challenger explosion?
No one, and we’d better get used to it.

• Risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable, and the
rituals of disaster have no meaning. Sometimes, what cause an accident is the
way minor events unexpectedly interacted to create a major problem. Normal
accident, it does not mean that it is frequent; it means that it is the kind of
accident one can expect in the normal functioning of a technologically complex
operation. Modern systems, are made up of thousand parts, all of which
interrelate in ways that are impossible to anticipate. Given that complexity of
minor failures will eventually amount to something catastrophic.

• Under certain circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an

organization safer in fact don’t. because human beings have a seemingly
fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking
greater risks in another. We consume the risk reduction, we don’t save it. This is
risk homeostasis. We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-
tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.
 Part 3:
Personality, Character, and
Intelligence
“He’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.
Buttoned.” – And he was.
 Late Bloomers
Why do we equate genius with precocity

• Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity –

doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness
and exuberance and energy of youth. Late bloomers are not as a result of some
defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of
creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to
come to fruition.

• Creativity, conceptual and experimental, we sometimes think of late bloomers

as late starters. They don’t realize they’re good at something until they’re fifty,
so of course they achieve late in life. We also sometimes think of them as artists
who are discovered late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. Late
bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their
careers.
 Late Bloomers
Why do we equate genius with precocity

• On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure:
while the late bloomer is receiving and despairing and changing course and
slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he/she produces will
look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all.
Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers
are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. Whenever we find a late
bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him/her we have thwarted
because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that
there’s nothing we can do about it. If you are the type of creative mind that starts
without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to
see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true
level.

• This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his/her success is highly contingent
on the efforts of others.
 Most likely to succeed
How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?

• There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates
before they start predicts how well they’ll do once they’re hired.

• Value added analysis uses standardized test scores to look at how much the
academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes
between the beginning and the end of the school year. Teacher effects dwarf
school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent
teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also
much stronger than class-size effects. Nothing matters more than finding people
with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a
person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.

• A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a

prejudice.
 Dangerous minds
Criminal profiling made easy

• Homology is the agreement between character and action.

• The organized killer is intelligent and articulate. He feels superior to those
around him. The disorganized killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He
often has some kind of disability. He’s too strange and withdrawn to be married
or have a girlfriend. If he doesn’t live alone, he lives with his parents. He has
pornography stashed in his closet. If he drives at all, his car is a wreck.
 The talent myth Are smart people overrated.
• Tacit knowledge involves things like knowing how to manage yourself and
others and how to navigate complicated social situations.

• An employer really wants to asses not potential but performance. The only
rigorous way to assess performance is to use criteria that are as specific as
possible. You can grade someone’s performance only if you know their
performance. The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart.
More often than not, it’s the other way round.

• Flawed managers fall into three types:

 One is the high likability floater, who rises effortlessly in an organization
because he never takes any difficult decisions or makes any enemies.
 Another is the Homme De Ressentiment, who seethes below the surface and
plots against his enemies.
 The narcissist, whose energy and self-confidence and charm lead him
inexorably up the corporate ladder. Narcissists are terrible managers. They resist
accepting suggestions, thinking it will make them appear weak, and they don’t
believe that others have anything useful to tell them. “Narcissists are biased to
take more credit for success than is legitimate”.
 The new-boy network
What do job interviews really tell us?

• It is a truism of the new economy that the ultimate success in any enterprise
lies with the quality of the people it hires.

• The power of first impressions suggests that human beings have a particular
kind of pre-rational ability for making searching judgments about others. What
we are picking up in that first instant would seem to be something quite basic
about a person’s character, because what we conclude after two seconds is pretty
much the same as what we could conclude after twenty minutes or, indeed, an
entire semester. The first impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we hear
what we expect to hear. The interview is hopelessly biased in favor of the nice.
Most of the time, we assume that people display the same character traits in
different situations. We habitually underestimate the large role that context plays
in people’s behavior. People who are shy in some contexts, talkative in other
situations, and outspoken in still other areas, then what it means to know
someone is to catalog and appreciate all those variations. Structured
interviewing are the only kind of interviewing that has any success at all in
predicting performance in the workplace, because the format is fairly rigid.
 Troublemakers
What pit bulls can teach us about crime

• Generalizations involve matching a category of people to a behavior or trait –

overweight middle-age men to heart-attack risk, young men to bad driving. But,
for that process to work, you have to be able both to define and to identify the
category you are generalizing about.