Malcom Gladwell: What the Dog Saw
Why is a two year old so terrible?
Because they are systematically testing the notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure—and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.
Other minds problem, 1 years olds don’t know that their parents like different things than they do.
Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day to say work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands.
Its the people in the middle who do all the work in the world.
There’s a difference between power and knowledge.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of “interestingness”
“For forty years, I’ve been promising to show people how to cut the pineapple, and I’ve never cut it once. Why would you cut the pineapple? If you cut it they’d leave.”
I know how to ask for money. And that’s the secret to the whole damn business.
An innovation is disruptive.
How do you persuade people to disrupt their lives?
You have to explain the invention to the customers—not once or twice but three of four times, with a different twist each time.
Interesting: there are many different perfects.
Moskowitz created forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce, designed to differ in every conceivable way.
After having groups of 25 eat 8-10 bowls of small spaghetti with different sauce and rate them on a scale of 1-100, the numbers were all over the map.
Everyone had a slightly different definition of that a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like.
However he found patterns, 3 groups emerged: plain, spicy, and extra chunky.
At the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the market.
By researching the true segmented desires of the spaghetti sauce market, Moskowitz found a new category worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego.
If you create one product, the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky.
With sensory segmentation you can get 70, 71, 72. That’s big. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.
Buying a stock, unlike buying an option, is a gamble that the future will represent an improved version of the past.
And who knows whether that will be true?
Taleb bets in changes in the market. He buys out-of-the-money options on both sides, on the possibility of the market moving up or down drastically.
He only buys options so he stands to lose a dime. He never sells options so he never risks losing everything on a random event sweeping the market.
Nassim Taleb has all of Emprica’s hundreds of millions in Treasury bills. If anything out of the ordinary happens to the stock market, he will still be rich.
Taleb buys options because he is certain that he knows nothing, and, more precisely, that other people believe they know more than they do.
The philosopher Popper said that you cannot know with any certainty that a proposition was true; you could only know that it was not true.
There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.
Interesting -
After an interview ask “Please draw me a figure—anything you want—and after the figure is drawn tell me a story about the figure.”
Extracts a narrative, can shed light on unstated desires.
You must have presence.
That is what makes the teacher who is able to walk into a room of rambunctious kids get everyone to calm down and behave.
Interesting: consider the difference between puzzle and mystery. Consider the nature of the problem.
A puzzle is hard to solve because you don’t have enough information.
A mystery is hard to solve because you have too much information and you must asses uncertainty.
Power-Law theory of homelessness
Interesting, 80% of homeless people were in and out of shelters really quickly.
One day was the most common. The second most common was two days.
The last 10% of the hockey stick power distribution is the chronically homeless who live in shelters for years and sleep on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling.
The City of NY spends and estimated $62 million on the 2,500 chronic homeless people of their city.
You build a soup kitchen and a shelter if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle, but if it’s a power-law problem that just allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless.
You do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.
Power law distribution of auto emissions
5 percent of the vehicles in denver produce 55 percent of the automobile pollution.
Power law distributions have little appeal to our rightward-leaning sides because they are not sweeping reforms. They involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment. They also have little appeal to our leftward-leaning sides because they emphasize efficiency over fairness.
Sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years working at your kitchen table.
This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others. The support of mentors and patrons allows for their long route to success.
The best way to teach is to be sensitive to student needs and to check in with students as often as possible.
Interesting, the quarterback problem suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.
Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and then judged after they start their jobs, not before.
Like the financial advising industry, where no one knows beforehand what makes a high-performing financial advisor different from a low-performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.
This also means rewards can’t be routine or rigid.
The only way to get people to try out for a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than those who handle its children?
Interesting: ask, do details co-concur?
If you see one detail from list A, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other traits/details from list A.
Companies work by different rules than individuals.
They execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many people, and the organizations that are the most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.
The virtue of organization can make individuals far more effective than previously.
If everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing?
The power of first impressions suggests that human beings have a particular kind of prerational ability for making searching judgements about others.
Thinking only gets in the way. Effective first impressions are governed by the lower brain structures.
The first impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To answer: “Are there things that you think you aren’t good at that make you worry?”
Myers said: “Are there things that I can’t learn? I think that’s the real question. There are a lot of things I don’t know anything about, but feel comfortable that given the right environment and the right encouragement I can do well at.”
Malcom experienced the little thrill as an interviewer when someone’s behavior confirms your expectations because he liked Myers since his first impression.
Had he decided early on that he didn’t like Myers, his answer would have come across as arrogant.
Interesting, Newcomb’s 1920 experiment showed that how talkative a boy was at lunch was highly predictive of how talkative the boy would be at lunch in the future.
However, this behavior told you nothing about how he would behave in a different setting, say his extroversion during afternoon playtime.
(Peake and Mischel) Even conscientiousness—how neat a students room was—had nothing to do with conscientiousness—how often he attended class—in the classroom setting.
How we behave at one time evidently has a lot to do with the particulars of our situation.
Context plays a large role in behavior.
Fundamental attribution error - the tendency to fixate in supposedly stable character traits and overlook the influence of context.
Interesting: Menkes inteview method 388-391.
Catalog and appreciate personality variations in different contexts by asking questions such as “You’re in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. How do you handle that situation?”
Use the answer to understand whether in a work-related crisis they would start from a self-centered position or a company-centric position.
Structured interviewing - shown be industrial psychologists to be the only kind of interviewing that has any success in predicting performance in the workplace.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to adopt because it doesn’t feel right.