Category: Notes

• The constitution was all about fighting monopolies
• Corporations used to die
• High tax rates meant businesses spent a lot of their money
• Natural monopolies are utilities and such
• “Conservatism” is all about cheap labor
  • No national health care because we want people dependent on their employers
  • Dependent employees can be paid less
  • Minimum wages and unions raise wages over time
  • No contraceptives mean woman are a riskier hire and will settle for less
  • Protestant work ethic lets us blame people for their poverty
  • Fear and bigotry keep us from seeing commonalities
•  Market concentration lowers wages and raised CEO compensation

• Economics has a strong self-fulfilling prophecy component
• Our fixed preferences are not known to us
• “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
• Counterfactuals are important for tests
• Cooperation requires more compute power than self interest
• Expertise is a claim to authority over others
• “‘Unintended’ does not mean ‘unforeseeable’”

• Blogs replaced the old wire services
• Content filters up as much as it filters down
• Traffic is money
• Anger generates traffic but sadness depresses it
• The original newspapers were editorial papers for [political] parties
• Package sales (whole papers or albums) let you sell innovative but sub-par things
• RSS were killed because they allow bypassing click-bait
• “Generally held ideas are idiocy because they have been able to appeal to everyone”
• It is really difficult to interpret silence
• Mentally, we put more emphasis on words read than words heard
• Outlandish claims are harder for us to dismiss because we fixate on comprehending the oddness of the claim
• Greek tragedies remind us how quickly tragedy can turn to befall is
• TV was all about amusement where blogs are about clicks
• You cannot have the news for free. You can only obscure the cost

• Humans are often scared of free will
• Reductionistic explanations generally work best when things go wrong
• TOTE loop: test, operate, test, exit
• People aware of the motivation behind rewards are apt to find less enjoyment in the work and the rewards
• Autonomy (ability to make decisions) is different from independence (not caring about how decisions affect others)
• Autonomy supporting management brings optimal performance
• Identified motivation is things we want to do because think we should even if we do not want to
• Interjected motivation is guilt driven
• We seek validation because we want to believe we are good people
• Brains tend to stay busy when we are not thinking about much
• Picking intrinsic goals make us happier
• Spending time thinking about the benefits of goals before picking them helps us pick better goals

Note: This book has an incredible number of references and correlations. One should read it if one is curious about sounds.

• Perfumes are designed to give off different smells as they evaporate