Category: Notes

A fun collection of bizarre medical (and mostly psychological) experiences Sacks had while practicing medicine. While few of these tails were of actual benefit to me, it was interesting to see how power the mind can be.

Interesting tidbit: Sacks’ tale for which the book is named after is one where the man, a brilliant music instructor, can no longer identify patterns but only disconnected attributes (i.e. he can see the nose, eyes and mouth but no longer recognizes an face). He is still able to correctly identify his students by their body movements or “body music” as he calls it.

This was a huge book, and in all honesty I only skimmed it. Wolfram talks about the power of building simple systems. Systems so basic that they range from 1 to 256 “rules” along the lines of “when these two things are together then do this.” Even with these very basic rules (especially in computer terms) he was able to build highly complex layouts, patterns and systems. He continues by identifying how this is the way that nature generally works: a very basic “rule” set leads to very complex systems (think of weather patterns, the inner workings of a star, etc).

Interesting tidbit: twisted rope (the form of rope we generally use today) has been around since at least 3000 BC. Crazy fact to find in a math book.

People who have been successful through out history (at least modern history) have been so because of the enormous effort they have put into their success, so argues Gladwell. He suggests that coming from a wealthy background and being born with a high IQ can help lay a foundation for that success but notes that there are more that many people who inherited wealth squander it and that there are more geniuses who have less than noteworthy jobs than those who do. Instead, proficiency and success usually comes after about seizing an opportunity, applying about 10,000 hours of practice and recognizing your cultural legacy. As with Gladwell’s other books, Outliers presents a narrative with a broad collection of story to illustrate his point.

Interesting tidbit: nineteenth century European farmers generally worked about 1200 hours a year. That is 200 more hours a year than hunter/gatherers (and I was always under the impression that we changed from hunter/gatherer to farmer because it was easier). Both of these pale in comparison to the rice farmers of the era who generally worked (and many still do) 3000 hours a year.

Most of the most important decisions we make, are made in a split second using “thin-slicing” decision making. These decisions are often made more correctly than we can manage if we put our minds to it. For example, doctors diagnosing heart attacks usually go through a long list of tests and procedures to determine if the attack is real. Doctors correctly diagnosed the heart attack 70%-90% of the time. Gladwell cites a study by Dr. Goldman who took hundreds of heart attack case studies into a computer program developed by physicists to build correlation models for particles. The result was a comparatively simple, and much less (needlessly) expensive, algorithm that allowed doctors to correctly diagnose heart attacks more than 95% of the time. Goldman’s process, as is the point of the book, happens with less information, much quicker and more accurately than the traditional process.

Interesting tidbit: John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has developed a 15 minute analysis, that with a 95% accuracy, can determine if a couple will still be married in 15 years. All by “thin-slicing” the conversation.

This book seeks to capture the essence of why things stick with us in society. Why is the urban legend about a man waking up in a tub of ice with his kidney removed still floating around when we cannot barely remember yesterday’s news? Why is Southwest still profitable (for 30 plus consecutive years) while other airlines struggle? The brothers Heath identify many underlying reasons and write them in an easy, and fun, easy to follow narrative.

Interesting tidbit: In one study, people who thought analytically before being asked to donate to African relieve donated an average of $1.14 out of $5. People who thought emotionally before being asked to donate to African relieve donated an average of $2.38 out of $5.

Side trivia: you are 300 times more likely to be killed by a deer than a shark.