Survivorship Bias Survivorship bias is very dangerous, as it doesn’t happen inside our brains. The filtering, which is normally done inside our brain, is being done by the world, is the result of unpredictable chaos theory. But since it seems an easy task to study the winners, that’s what people do. Network […]
Immortal Monkey Apocalypse
Shakespeare Experiment There’s a theory that if you put enough monkeys on an island, each banging away on a typewriter, they’ll eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare. This is true in theory, so long as they bang on a typewriter long enough, a certain percentage of the random stuff they type will make […]
Imaginary Party Games
Book Club People I have a friend who is a very die-hard, old school, book lover. She belongs to a book club and none of them like to use any technology. They only read hardback books, they don’t have smartphones, and they even refuse to read books written after world war II. […]
Emergent Soul Theory
Unconscious Influence Cialdini has long studied the forces of influence that exist outside of our conscious awareness. The most common is social proof, but this one is a bit tricky, since everybody knows what social proof is, and every tends to try to leverage social proof in their favor. But all of us […]
Emergent Financial Parasites
Black Jack System Before the advent and widespread use of facial recognition technology, a group of MIT students developed a very lucrative blackjack system. They made a movie about it, but the movie was necessarily altered to make room for good guys and bad guys and back stories and character arcs. But the […]
Invisible Violin Player
Water Boy A few years ago some guy came by selling some water filters. He tried the puppy dog close, which is a pretty good closing technique, as it leverages commitment and consistency, as well as liking. But it does require you present your offer well, and you actually have a product that […]
Circle Origin Story
Trigonometry is Magic One of the coolest discoveries in mathematics is that of trigonometry. Since cycles are a deep part of the natural world, and trigonometry deals in cycles, its discovery helped humans to understand a lot more than they did previously. It all started by wondering about the mathematical descriptions of the […]
Mental Brain Illusions
What You See Isn’t Real There are a lot of cool optical illusions. They are, of course, based on mismatch between what you see, and what you think you are seeing. Our eyes and our visual cortex need to make a lot of assumptions about what we think we see, and up to […]
Social Proof Frame Strength
Persuasion Experiments There have been a lot of cool experiments done to demonstrate the various triggers of influence that operate outside of our conscious awareness. In a social proof experiment, they had a guy stand on a corner, and stare up into an empty sky, but pretending that he was looking at something incredibly […]
Peak Brain
Tension and Release Tension and release can be found everywhere, from inorganic matter, to large celestial objects like the sun. Books, movies and music all have tension and release built into the structure. Even humor is based on tension and release, and is thought to bring many health benefits, such as lower blood […]
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