psychology

“it allows individual choice to depend on the context in which the choices are made”—a clear violation of the coherence doctrine.

They had simply translated their own grades onto the scale used in officer school, applying intensity matching. Once again, the failure to address the (considerable) uncertainty of their predictions had led them to predictions that were completely nonregressive.

Everyone bifurcates the world into content and distribution,” Whaley told me. He has brown hair, is of average height, and was wearing a nondescript gray t-shirt and jeans when we talked. “From the beginning, we viewed those as the same thing. Each object gets better with more participation, and so does MSCHF. Scale is not the goal. Scale is a tool

“Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.”

In contrast, our decision to view outcomes as gains and losses led us to focus precisely on this discrepancy.

Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.

we rarely connect our desire to create with the goal of behavior change. At most companies, the decision-making process behind what we build still looks like an episode of Mad Men: people, generally white and male and lacking any expertise other than privilege, throw ideas out until one of them sounds sexy enough, and that’s what gets built. The

If our thinking about what caused the technique to be effective was correct, the second request did not have to be small; it only had to be smaller than the initial one. It was our suspicion that the critical aspect of a requester’s retreat from a larger to a smaller favor was its appearance as a concession. So the second request could be an

There’s an even bigger challenge needed to build a lasting business: scaling your taste, not just into a single object, but into an organization that can build and distribute many products that reflect that taste