Category: Notes

• “This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains.”
• “[O]ur dramatic instincts—are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview.”
• Beware of averages… The can make a huge gap out of a sea of overlap
• “Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves non-representative extraordinary events and shuns normality.”
• News is, by definition, novel and not routine
• “To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.”
• “Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context…”
• “Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to.”
• We want to consume dramatic information
• “You can spot stories about them in the news every day:
  • physical harm: violence caused by people, animals, sharp objects, or forces of nature
  • captivity: entrapment, loss of control, or loss of freedom
  • contamination: by invisible substances that can infect or poison us”

Rules

1. A chart should be considered a visual argument, not an illustration
2. Baselines should show 0
3. Good charts have good scaffolding
4. Pay attention to scale labels
5. Include:
   1. Data source citations
   2. Measurements, units, and scales
6. Never trust a chart that does not disclose its sources

Notes

• Any chart will lie if you are not paying attention to it
• Be wary of means, they can mask extremes
• “Instead, they should design a chart that finds an aspect ratio that neither exaggerates nor minimizes the change. How is that so? We are representing a 35% increase. That’s 35 over 100, or 1/3 (aspect ratios put width first, so in this case it would be 3:1).”
• “A chart shows only what it shows, and nothing else.”

• “When the people have to manage dangers from inside the organization, the organization itself becomes less able to face the dangers from outside.”
• “Every single employee is someone’s son or someone’s daughter. Like a parent, a leader of a company is responsible for their precious lives.”
• Chemicals in our body
  • Endorphins to mask pain, for a time
  • Dopamine to feel good, right now, and imagine things
  • Serotonin for contentment and pride
  • Oxytocin for lasting love and trust
  • Cortisol for Flight, Fight, or Freeze, and blocking oxytocin
• Faking status improvements lowers one’s morale
• We expect well-compensated leaders to offer good protection; we feel betrayed when they do not
• (It would behoove leaders to make sure we know they are sacrificing for us, how else would we know to trust them?)
• Abstracting people allows us to mistreat them (laying off “FTEs” is easier than laying off “people”)
• Customer testimonials can have a powerful boost in customer productivity, much more than telling employees how they will benefit from meeting a goal
• Abundance can lead to greed and the application of resource to tilt things in our favor

I had no idea the college selection process (student picking their colleges) was no messed up and arbitrary.

• The rich and famous do not come from top-tier universities
• You need to take time to recognize what you love and what you are good at
• Less prestigious school can afford that time
• College rankings are a racket
• Your major is far more important for your career than your college

• Humans make decisions by relativity
  • With three options, we tend to buy the middle options
  • We eschew difficult-to-compare options
  • For example, comparing a colonial house to a contemporary house is difficult; add a second colonial house that needs some TLC, and we are driven to embrace the better colonial house
• When exposed to a new product, the first price is anchored or imprinted on us
• Arbitrary Coherence: Once an arbitrary anchor price is established, related prices are effect coherence
  • We expect subsequent prices to file in alignment with the price; outliers are scrutinized or discarded
  • Anchors are set when we consider buying something at a certain price
• Money is a very expense motivator
• Highly emotional states dramatically change our reaction to choose
• We are bad at predicting how we will react in high-emotion situations
• Dictated schedules has better performance than self-imposed schedules which have better performance than no schedule
• Higher prices often adjust our experiences
• Shifting our focus from price to product, we can counter the perceptional shift
• We think of dishonesty in such grand terms that our super ego does not register the small stuff
• People tend to cheat, a little, when they can; but recalling honor at the time of temptation, curbs their inclination
• The further away from cash you get (tokens, shares, items, etc.), the more dishonest people get
• People have a need to be unique, even to the detriment of their pleasure