implementation

idea, Diener and his students also found a less-is-more effect, a strong indication that an average (prototype) has been substituted for a sum.

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!

Category design involves educating the market about a new, often-ignored problem as well as a solution that you can provide.

He tries to focus or limit sources of “frictionless consumption ,” though he’s not an absolutist: “That kind of stuff has a time and place, particularly if you’re stuck on a problem. Sometimes, procrastinating on something simple or distracting can allow the right thought to appear.

People started realising that those techniques could be used to study other things.

innovations were technologically straightforward. They generally packaged known technologies in a unique architecture and enabled the use of these products in applications where magnetic data storage and retrieval previously had not been technologically or economically feasible.

Ergodic systems, in other words, exhibit a particularly safe and comforting sort of statistical regularity.

“We humans sort of suck at all of them individually, but we have some kind of very approximate idea about each of them and can combine them and be somewhat adaptive. That seems to be what the trick is.”

behavior change itself will be inherently imperfect. You can lose the battle—a person, a specific moment, a single unit of behavior—and still win the war. This is true because populations are, in the aggregate, largely predictable. Even if any given person might not do what we expect all the time, the overall behavior of large numbers of people