Incerto 4-Book Bundle

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you; the rest is just commentary.

Say you always have the same threshold of reactions. You take a set level of abuse, say seventeen insulting remarks per week, before getting into a rage and punching the eighteenth offender in the nose. Such predictability will allow people to take advantage of you up to that well-known trigger point and stop there. But if you randomize your trigge

Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death? Would you like to know who committed the crime before the beginning of the movie? Actually, wouldn’t it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

The question remains whether optimizers are unhappy because they are constantly seeking a better deal or if unhappy people tend to optimize out of their misery.

research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.

(or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species. A slightly random schedule prevents us from optimizing and being exceedingly efficient, particularly in the wrong things.

we continue to worship those who won battles and despise those who lost, no matter the reason.

To view it in another way, consider the difference between judging on process and judging on results. Lower-ranking persons in the enterprise are judged on both process and results—in fact, owing to the repetitive aspect of their efforts, their process converges rapidly to results. But top management is only paid on result—no matter the process.