A thread on my highlights from a great book by @rorysutherland:
“Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense”
You enjoy reading @nntaleb’s books? You will love this one.
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
“Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense”
You enjoy reading @nntaleb’s books? You will love this one.
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.
In real life, most things aren’t logical, they are psycho-logical.
In theory, you can’t be too logical, but in practice, you can.
Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.
If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.
Think of life as like a criminal investigation: a beautifully linear and logical narrative when viewed in retrospect, but a fiendishly random, messy and wasteful process when experienced in real time.
The study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should.
There is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.
Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.
The world runs on two operating systems. The much smaller of them runs on conventional logic.
For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.
In maths, 10 x 1 is always the same as 1 x 10, but in real life, it rarely is. You can trick ten people once, but it’s much harder to trick one person ten times.
Everyone likes to go to a nightclub in the company of a friend who’s slightly less attractive than them.
The profusion of data in future will not settle arguments: it will make them worse.
We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.
If rationality were valuable in evolutionary terms, accountants would be sexy.
It’s surely better to find satisfactory solutions for a realistic world, than perfect solutions for an unrealistic one.
Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club.
