implementation

Consider the case of Silver Blaze, that famous missing racehorse that no one can track down. When Holmes has had a chance to examine the premises, Inspector Gregson, who has failed to find something as seemingly impossible to miss as a horse, asks, “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Why yes, Holmes responds, “To the

The principles—reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, commitment and consistency, and unity—are discussed both in terms of their function in society and in terms of how their enormous force can be commissioned by a compliance professional who deftly incorporates them into requests for purchases, donations, concessions, votes, or

If you just want to get by in life, it’s fine to rely on the default set of narratives that saturate your culture. But the more original and ambitious your goals are, the more you need world-class narrative skills: both on the buy and the sell side.

And on and on to the lowliest intern, who gets “When African American women between twenty and thirty who live in Los Angeles want to get something to go from Point A to Point B, and they have a device with connectivity, they will create an Uber account (measured by account creation).”

This all may sound highly unnatural, but I promise that, even if it is the most ambiguous step, intervention selection is surprisingly intuitive. Most of your nonconscious brain is busily chunking away on precisely these kinds of trade-offs all the time: we pair complementary flavors in cooking, triangulate location/cost/proximity to our favorite

Machines for breadth, human intuition for depth

Sean Monahan, co-founder of K-Hole and writer of the 8Ball newsletter, recently argued that, with the advent of AI, the human trend forecaster will become obsolete. I disagree. What I think will happen instead is that LLMs will raise the standards for our trend research. Machine and human

By stacking motivations, that is, layering curiosity atop curiosity atop curiosity, we’re increasing drive but not effort. This is what happens when our own internal biology does the heavy lifting for us. You’ll work harder, but you won’t notice the work. Also, because dopamine provides a host of additional cognitive benefits—amplified focus,

Michael Faraday—famous for his work in electromagnetism—observed that inhaling ether vapors could produce profound lethargy and insensibility to pain. Unfortunately, taking a page from Davy’s work with nitrous oxide, Faraday instead focused on the “exhilarating” properties of ether.