Future Babble by Dan Gardner

A book about why we have a desperate need to try and predict the future but why we will always be doomed to fail.  Although there are some traits that make some people slightly better at it than others.
A must read book for all those struggling to compose Strategic Plans or Budget submissions.

A really telling insight was that those who are most confident that they are right are the worst at predicting the future with any degree of certainty.  Statistically the best prediction is that the future will be the same as today (because for most of the time it is) this will be wrong for sure but more accurate than most forecasters.

The book looks at our evolutionary drive to understand what is going to happen and to the biases this builds into our judgement and our memory.

So how do we get better:

• Gather information from as many sources as possible
• Accept you may well be wrong and actively seek out views that do not agree with yours.  Draft a list of reasons why your belief may be wrong
• Display humility, nothing is certain and your predictions should never be so.
• Consider how your decisions will play out if your predictions turn out to be wrong.  A good decision is robust in the face of various futures.

No matter how often expert predictions fail, we want more. This strange phenomenon led Scott Armstrong, an expert on forecasting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, to coin his “seer-sucker” theory: “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.” Sometimes we even go back to the very people whose predictions failed in the past and listen, rapt, as they tell us how the future will unfold. This book explains why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway.Read more at location 365

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Certain styles of thinking and decision making do a far better job of groping amid the inky blackness of the future to find a path ahead. These styles can be learned and applied, with results that are positive, although far from perfect. And that leads to the ultimate conclusion, which is one we do not want to accept but must: There are no crystal balls, and no style of thinking, no technique, no model will ever eliminate uncertainty.Read more at location 398

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Experts who did better than the average of the group – and better than random guessing – thought very differently. They had no template. Instead, they drew information and ideas from multiple sources and sought to synthesize it. They were self-critical, always questioning whether what they believed to be true really was. And when they were shown that they had made mistakes, they didn’t try to minimize, hedge, or evade. They simply acknowledged they were wrong and adjusted their thinking accordingly. Most of all, these experts were comfortable seeing the world as complex and uncertain – so comfortable that they tended to doubt the ability of anyone to predict the future. That resulted in a paradox: The experts who were more accurate than others tended to be much less confident that they were right.Read more at location 581

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Put all that together and there’s a very clear lesson: If you hear a hedgehog make a long-term prediction, it is almost certainly wrong. Treat it with great skepticism.Read more at location 595

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economists Ron Alquist and Lutz Kilian published a paper in which they examined all the sophisticated methods one could use to determine the price of oil one month, one quarter, or one year in the future. They looked at fancy econometric models. They looked at oil prices in futures and spot markets. They looked at the consensus opinion of oil analysts. And they found that anyone could do better than all these crystal balls, sometimes far better, by applying a mindless rule: Always predict that the price in the future will be whatever the price is now. True, this technique is far from accurate. In fact, it’s pretty awful. But the others are worse.Read more at location 707

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“There’s a demand for the forecasts so people generate them,”Read more at location 1054

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Foxes are okay with that. They like complexity and uncertainty, even if that means they can draw only cautious conclusions and they have to admit they could be wrong. “Maybe” is fine with them.Read more at location 1671

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“This effect contributes to the appeal of scenarios and the illusory insight they often provide,” Kahneman and Tversky wrote. And it’s so easy to do. Just add details, colour, and drama. And pile on the predictions. The actual accuracy will plummet but the feeling of plausibility will soar.Read more at location 2107

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People who try to peer into the future – both experts and laypeople – are very likely to start with an unreasonable bias in favour of the status quo. Today’s trends will continue, and tomorrow will be like today, only more so. With that belief in place, the confirmation bias that so misled Arnold Toynbee kicks in. Evidence that supports the belief is embraced without question; evidence that contradicts the belief is treated with extreme suspicion or, more often, ignored. Steadily, the belief that tomorrow will be like today grows into a strong conviction. Occasionally, a surprise – the decline of Japan, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the crash of 2008 – slaps us in the face and we are reminded that tomorrow may not be like today. Suitably chastened, we get imaginative and think of all the ways the surprise that just happened could happen again … and we are right back in the mental rut of the status quo. Genuinely imaginative attempts to portray change – including scenario planning – may help pull us out of that rut but they may also cause us to develop an unrealistic sense of how likely those imaginative futures really are. And all the while, no matter what happens, we are convinced we are right.Read more at location 2129

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In an unsettling study, elderly residents of a nursing home were placed in rooms where everything was handled by others, right down to the arrangement of the furniture and the selection and care of a house-plant. With no decisions to make, their environment was pleasant but completely out of their control. Other residents of the home were given the same room and treatment, but they were asked to decide how the furniture would be arranged and they were asked to select and care for a plant. A year and a half later, 30 per cent of the residents without control had died, compared to 15 per cent of those with control.Read more at location 2456

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Gilbert noted. “People feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur.”Read more at location 2561

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“Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes,” the review noted, “but it is less urgent with regard to good ones.” People whose brains gave priority to bad news were much less likely to be eaten by lions or die some other unpleasant and untimely death than those whose brains did not, and so “negativity bias” became a universal human trait.37Read more at location 2571

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The experts who dominate the media won’t be the most accurate. In fact, they will be the least accurate. And that is precisely what Philip Tetlock discovered. Using Google hits as a simple way to measure the fame of each of his 284 experts, Tetlock found that the more famous the expert, the worse he did.Read more at location 2721

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In much the same way, a strong, enthusiastic, confident speaking style has a power that transcends mere rationalityRead more at location 2791

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researchers concluded that “persuasion is a function not of intelligence, prediscussion conviction, position with respect to the issue, manifest ability, or volubility, but of the expression of confidence during the discussion itself.” Very simply: confidence convinces.Read more at location 2808

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Robertson doesn’t deny that his story is very simplistic, or that there’s far more to his thinking. But he doesn’t go further because this story is what people want. Anything more is needless complication. “You don’t have to sit there and bring in all these charts and stuff,” he says. “If you don’t trust me, it won’t make a difference.”Read more at location 2925

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For experts who want the public’s attention, Paul Ehrlich is the gold standard. Be articulate, enthusiastic, and authoritative. Be likeable. See things through a single analytical lens and craft an explanatory story that is simple, clear, conclusive, and compelling. Do not doubt yourself. Do not acknowledge mistakes. And never, ever say “I don’t know.”Read more at location 3014

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It’s especially true among those who put together business forecasts; managers and executives know that someone who wishes to keep her job will not announce to a roomful of superiors that the future is complex, unpredictable, and out of her control – no matter how true that may be. But more than all the rest, the news media know the lesson of Paul Ehrlich.Read more at location 3040

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Be simple, clear, and confident. Be extreme. Be a good storyteller. Think and talk like a hedgehog.Read more at location 3129

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the different emphasis we put on predictions that hit and those that miss. We ignore misses, even when they lie scattered by the dozen at our feet; we celebrate hits, even when we have to hunt for them and pretend there was more to them than luck. This discrepancy is so extreme and pervasive it even has a name. It’s the “Jeane Dixon Effect,”Read more at location 3238

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They may be wrong far more often than they are right. They may do worse than flipped coins and stopped clocks. But they never fail to deliver the certainty that we crave. And we never fail to ask for more.Read more at location 3476

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Memory is an organic process, not a recording. While memories can remain sharp and fixed for decades, they can also evolve, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. These changes aren’t random. Memories serve the present: We misremember in ways that suit the needs of the moment.Read more at location 3778

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Knowing the world is fundamentally uncertain and unpredictable, and knowing that the brains we use to understand this uncertain and unpredictable world contain psychological biases and other tripwires that skew our judgement, a little humility is in order. The future is dark, and much as we might like to see in the dark, we cannot. Imagining otherwise is dangerous. Stride confidently forward in the dark and you’re likely to feel quite pleased with yourself right up until the moment you walk into a wall.Read more at location 4434

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While our decisions have to be made on the basis of what we think is going to happen, we must always consider how our decisions will fare if the future turns out to be very different. A good decision is one that delivers positive results in a wide range of futures.Read more at location 4475

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Recall that people whose thinking style marks them as “foxes,” in Philip Tetlock’s terms, are modest about their ability to forecast the future, comfortable with complexity and uncertainty, and very self-critical – they are always questioning whether what they believe to be true really is. Foxes also reject intellectual templates, preferring to gather ideas and information from as many sources as they can get their hands on.Read more at location 4591

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By grabbing on to whatever information is available, from whatever source, foxes aggregate. They may not do it as well as a prediction market, but the fundamental process is the same, and it helps make their judgement superior to that of hedgehogs who know One Big Thing and aren’t interested in finding out more.Read more at location 4608

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The second element at work is what psychologists call metacognition. This is simply thinking about thinking. Alan Barnes constantly pushes his analysts to reflect on their conclusions, to question them, to ask themselves where they came from and whether they really make sense or not.Read more at location 4616

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A basic method for overcoming confirmation bias, for example, is to draft a list of reasons why your belief may be wrong, but the analysts “are reluctant to use even that extremely simple tool,”Read more at location 4629

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The last of the three key elements at work is humility. “I think when you’re dealing with future events, pretending that you have absolute certainty is doing the reader a great disservice,” Barnes says.Read more at location 4633

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The billionaire financier George Soros is a classic fox.Read more at location 4648

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Anyone who reads history with sufficient imagination to overcome hindsight bias knows this. What appears most likely, or even certain, does not happen, while what happens is something quite unexpected. It was true for my grandfather’s generation. It was true for my mother’s. It is true for mine. And it will be true for my children’s, which is one of the few grand-scale predictions I am comfortable making. As journalist James Fallows observed, “What looks like tomorrow’s problem is rarely the real problem when tomorrow rolls around.”Read more at location 4764

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

Quite a disturbing book about how the medical profession have been on a drive to have an easy simple way of detecting psychopaths.  Unfortunately most of us display some of the traits on the PCL-R Hare checklist at some point, and once you have been labelled it is very difficult to prove otherwise since the more you deny it the stronger you are seen to be a psychopath.

The actual book is engaging and written as a story of how a journalist investigates a series of particular cases rather than a dry academic text.  It doesn't just cover those in mental institutions but also reality TV contestants, ADHD in schools, senior corporate managers, .....

Really made me think - am I a psychopath, how many people I know are psychopaths by these definitions?

They say Hubbard was the very first man to reveal that psychiatrists were dosing patients with massive amounts of LSD and electro-convulsive therapy in secret CIA-funded attempts to create brainwashed assassins. He published his account of the experiments in 1969 and it wasn’t until June 1975 that the Washington Post announced to an unsuspecting world that these programmes (codenamed MK-ULTRA) existed.Read more at location 789

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Their conclusions became the basis for his now-famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this: 

ITEM 1:  Glibness/superficial charm 

ITEM 2:  Grandiose sense of self-worth 

ITEM 3:  Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom 

ITEM 4:  Pathological lying 

ITEM 5:  Cunning/manipulative 

ITEM 6:  Lack of remorse or guilt 

ITEM 7:  Shallow affect

ITEM 8:  Callous/lack of empathy 

ITEM 9:  Parasitic lifestyle 

ITEM 10:  Poor behavioral controls 

ITEM 11:  Promiscuous sexual behavior 

ITEM 12:  Early behavior problems 

ITEM 13:  Lack of realistic long-term goals 

ITEM 14:  Impulsivity 

ITEM 15:  Irresponsibility

ITEM 16:  Failure to accept responsibility for own actions 

ITEM 17:  Many short-term marital relationships 

ITEM 18:  Juvenile delinquency 

ITEM 19:  Revocation of conditional release 

ITEM 20:  Criminal versatilityRead more at location 1500

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They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain there’s not much left except the will to win.’ ‘Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The higher you go up the ladder the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.’Read more at location 1772

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Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work – co-authored with a psychologist named Paul Babiak.Read more at location 2141

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Practically every peak-time programme is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The people who are the right sort of mad are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as them. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as them. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.Read more at location 3265

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There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.Read more at location 4220

The coming jobs war by Jim Clifton

Written by Gallup, the polling organisation the book gives a frankly depressing view of the likely future track of the 'developed western countries' particularly America.  In fact the book is a little too xenophobic for my taste, although the messages as the author says could be applied anywhere.  What he seems to fail to realise is that there are many other countries in the 'race' he describes and I see no particular reason why the USA should win.

In addition to the well known 12 employee engagement questions (that we really should use at work rather than keep developing our own as there is so much baseline data) the book outlines a set of customer engagement and student engagement questions along similar lines

Six years into our global data collection effort, we may have already found the single most searing, clarifying, helpful, world-altering fact. What the whole world wants is a good job. This is one of the most important discoveries Gallup has ever made.Read more at location 118 •
Humans used to desire love, money, food, shelter, safety, peace, and freedom more than anything else. The last 30 years have changed us. Now people want to have a good job, and they want their children to have a good job.Read more at location 126 •
So what would going broke look like on a national scale? Well, take a look at Detroit, and imagine that economic disaster coast to coast. Look at California. California can’t pay its pensions, it will likely declare bankruptcy, a lot of its employees are going to be out of a job, and its bond holders won’t be able to get their money. The same is true for Illinois and Michigan.Read more at location 187 •
Yet a country’s GDP is its most important leading indicator. So goes its increase and decrease, so goes jobs, spending, tax base, and then everything else. Size matters, but so does direction.Read more at location 280 •
And then there’s this fact, which few people seem to recognize: All money is going to get spent anyway. You’ll spend it, your business will spend it, or your government will spend it.Read more at location 351 •
“My hard-earned government pension has been slashed.” You’ll start hearing this slowly at first, and then all the time. That’s because when the GDP has no growth, there is no job growth, which depletes the once huge tax base that pays for everything. And so the government has to cut services by a third, including government pensions.Read more at location 370 •
With fewer jobs, there are fewer workers to fund Social Security. So payments get cut. And it’s a significant problem for a democratic system that has elected officials who don’t want to address it, because explaining that this program simply cannot continue making the payments the way it does now will cause them to lose elections.Read more at location 390 •
Plato made a very cruel but astute observation: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”Read more at location 766 •
Innovation has no value until it creates something a customer wants. Here is a Gallup economics finding that few leaders anywhere know: Even the best ideas and inventions in the world have no value until they have a customer.Read more at location 894 •
Let me summarize the biggest body of behavioral economic data in the world on workplaces. It comes from a Gallup study on workplace productivity, and it consists of 12 critical elements of work life. Gallup has asked millions of workers worldwide to respond to these items for more than a decade and always finds the same thing: Miserable employees create miserable customers.Read more at location 1048 •
And if you can’t find the misery quotient, I guarantee your accounting department will. It will take a year or two though. I’ve observed that employee misery precedes all the easy-to-find data by one day to two years, depending on the type of business. Somebody in the company needs to treat a customer like hell for between one day and two years before the customer will defect. Customer defections are immediately followed by job loss.Read more at location 1053 •
And then there are the 19% of actively disengaged employees who are there to dismantle and destroy your company. They exhaust managers, they have more on-the-job accidents and cause more quality defects,Read more at location 1082 •
Gallup also found that other apparent key variables (such as “I’m fairly compensated”) outside the 12 didn’t distinguish between engaged and disengaged employees. These 12 items hold up statistically throughout all job variations and throughout business and industry, retail, hospitality, manufacturing, government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the military, education — virtually all jobs everywhere in the world.Read more at location 1097 •

There’s one behavioral economic demand left, and it is big. If you don’t get this one right, everything after it falls apart. Once you have carefully diagnosed an individual’s strengths and given her that near-perfect job that she has real talent to perform with a mission and purpose, make sure she has a great manager. Everything else on The Gallup Path shuts down if an employee has a bad boss.Read more at location 1217 •

A leader’s most defining moment is the decision of whom to name as manager at any level — whom to put in charge of developing the talents and skills of others. If a leader chooses good managers, everything works. If a leader assigns the wrong person as manager, everything fails. Nothing fixes bad managers, not coaching, competency training, incentives, or warnings — nothing works. A bad manager never gets better.Read more at location 1224 •
In fact, one of the biggest blind spots in most American businesses is that they don’t realize how big the emotional economy is within their own customer base worldwide. The best corporate leaders in the United States are still unaware that they are leaving a great deal of money on the table through abysmal execution of the employee-customer links because they are so focused on the “hard numbers,” of which they have already squeezed every dollarRead more at location 1291 •
To measure customer engagement, these are the best 11 questionsRead more at location 1306 •
Gallup scientists have found to ask customers anywhere in the world: CE1. Taking into account all the products and services you receive from them, how satisfied are you with (Company) overall? CE2. How likely are you to continue to do business with (Company)? CE3. How likely are you to recommend (Company) to a friend or associate? CE4. (Company) is a name I can always trust. CE5. (Company) always delivers on what they promise. CE6. (Company) always treats me fairly. CE7. If a problem arises, I can always count on (Company) to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution. CE8. I feel proud to be (a/an) (Company) customer. CE9. (Company) always treats me with respect. CE10. (Company) is the perfect company/product for people like me. CE11. I can’t imagine a world without (Company).Read more at location 1307 •
There are more than 75 million students enrolled in schools in the United States — nearly 50 million in the 5th through 12th grades. They are the successors of today’s business leaders. The problem is, approximately 30% of those students will drop out or fail to graduate on schedule. About 50% of minorities are dropping out. This gives the rest of the developed world a huge advantage over the United States in the upcoming economic wars.Read more at location 1406 •
Gallup continues to find, as we have for more than 75 years, that lots of money is rarely the solution to big problems. Sometimes, in fact, the bigger the problem, the less expensive the solution. What’s expensive is trying to fix after-the-fact outcomes rather than creating strategies that get at the behaviors and cause.Read more at location 1425 •
Gallup Student Poll Items: 1. Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? 2. I know I will graduate from high school. 3. There is an adult in my life who cares about my future. 4. I can think of many ways to get good grades.Read more at location 1481 •
5. I energetically pursue my goals. 6. I can find lots of ways around any problem. 7. I know I will find a good job after I graduate. 8. I have a best friend at school. 9. I feel safe in this school. 10. My teachers make me feel my schoolwork is important. 11. At this school, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. 12. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good schoolwork. 13. My school is committed to building the strengths of each student. 14. In the last month, I volunteered my time to help others. 15. Were you treated with respect all day yesterday? 16. Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? 17. Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday? 18. Did you have enough energy to get things done yesterday? 19. Do you have health problems that keep you from doing any of the things other people your age normally can do? 20. If you are in trouble, do you have family or friends you can count on to help whenever you need them?Read more at location 1488 •
If you were to ask me, from all of Gallup’s data and research on entrepreneurship, what will most likely tell you if you are winning or losing your city, my answer would be, “5th to 12th graders’ image of and relationship to free enterprise and entrepreneurship.” The better the image, the more likely your city will win. If your city doesn’t have growing economic energy in your 5th through 12th graders, you will experience neither job creation nor city GDP growth.Read more at location 1530 •
1. The United States spent $2,500,000,000,000 on healthcare in 2009 — two and a half trillion dollars. Nearly half of this comes from Medicare and Medicaid (taxes). And the other half is private insurance and out-of-pocket spending. 2. This is the biggest price tag for anything in America. War in Iraq and Afghanistan run about $200 billion per year. The healthcare bill per year is 10 times bigger than the annual warRead more at location 1621 •
A hospital is, honest to God, a more dangerous place to be than Iraq or Afghanistan. Over the last eight years, about 6,000 American soldiers have been killed while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the same time, nearly 800,000 American patients have been killed by healthcare mistakes — and about 8,000,000 injured. War fatalities are so small compared to what is happening in hospitals and healthcare facilities. And of course, patients aren’t dying for their country.Read more at location 1666 •

Born Liars why we can't live without deceit by Ian Leslie

A book investigating why we are programmed to deceive, most of all to deceive ourselves.  Touches on topics from several other books I have read, explaining that what we perceive as reality is actually constructed by our minds some time after the event (so as to best fit with our mental view of the world).

Interesting chapters on child development and at what point they are able to deceive and detect deception.

Looks at how the evolutionary explosion in teh size of our brain can be traced back to having to manage living in larger social groups with an 'arms race' of deception and detection.


Based on the size of our brains, he said, we should be able to cope with a social group – people we would happily meet for a drink, say – of about a hundred and fifty people. Sure enough, when he combed through the anthropological and sociological literature, he found that a hundred and fifty worked as a rough average of the size of many human social groups, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern army units and company departments.Read more at location 215 •
Two-year-olds start to sense that their parents have feelings, and that they can affect those feelings by what they do. They then proceed to test this fascinating insight to destruction.Read more at location 368 •
Great liars tend to be great readers of human behaviour. Think of Iago, a ‘people person’ if ever there was one, subtly drawing out Othello’s rage, or reflect that Bill Clinton is famous for being both a convincing liar and a politician of exceptional empathy.Read more at location 438 •
What’s clear is that, faced with a group of people and asked to identify the liar, you’d be better off picking the most charismatic and fluent person in the room rather than, as we’re inclined to, the shifty-looking mumbler in the corner. Lying requires high cognitive, emotional and social abilities. The best liars tend to be charming, empathetic, and capable of thinking several moves aheadRead more at location 927 •
When you are talking to someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result you tend to judge others on what you see, and ourselves by what you feel.Read more at location 1111 •
This description of memory tallies with the experimental evidence of Elizabeth Loftus, and with the findings of modern neuroscience. Remembering is an act of creative reconstruction rather than simple replaying. Every time a memory is recalled it is re-formed, and in the process it becomes mingled with the stories of others and shaped by our own anxieties, desires and imaginings. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, the brain carries ‘no hard copies’.Read more at location 1731 •
that our feeling of free will is nothing but a trick of perspective – a deception practised by the brain. A conscious ‘decision’ is merely a story we tell ourselves to explain what has happened to us, or what our bodies have already executed. This is a deeply contentious position, although many neuroscientists agree with him. There is certainly a huge amount of experimental evidence that our unconscious brain guides and determines many of the everyday decisions we think of as conscious ones.Read more at location 1869 •
Anthony Greenwald compressed this even further when he coined the word beneffectance to describe the normal human tendency to interpret reality so as to present ourselves as both beneficial and effective. Whenever either of these propositions are thrown into question, we are good at inventing stories that resolve the inconsistency between our actions and our self-image. Most of the time we’re not aware of doing so.Read more at location 2283 •

scientist Harold McGee has pointed out that the pungent smell of certain cheeses, like Vieux Boulogne, is the smell of decay – something we are hard-wired to find disgusting (and thus to avoid for our own good). That some people, in certain countries – especially France, of course – find such smells appetising is testament to the extent that our senses are in thrall to the beliefs we inherit from the culture in which we live.Read more at location 3071 •
Other studies have shown that green pills are better at reducing anxiety, and white pills are best for soothing ulcers. Patients who take four sugar pills a day clear their gastric ulcers faster than those who take two sugar pills a day. Large pills work better than medium-sized pills, and very small pills work best of all. Placebos that patients believe to be expensive work better than those they think cost less. Fake surgery involving impressivelooking, excitingly-named machines works extremely well indeed.Read more at location 3211 •
The anthropologist Robin Fox put it to me like this: ‘The brain’s business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view – one we can act on.’ Its primary job is to help the packet of tissue, bone and muscle in which it’s encased to survive and thrive; reporting reality is an important but secondary consideration. So is telling the truth to others.Read more at location 3570 •

Adapt why success always starts with failure by Tim Harford

This book looks at how tolerating, in fact thriving on, failure is the best way to make progress and foster innovation.  That applying the evolutionary approach to innovative development is the most efficient in the long run.  It also covers why our psychology makes it so tough for us to accept this course of action.

It covers three principles:
1) seek out new ideas and try new things;
2) when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable;
3) seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

Predictions about Russia from experts on Russia were no more accurate than predictions about Russia from experts on Canada.Read more at location 159 •
Most accounts of Tetlock’s research savour the humbling of the professional pundits. And why not? One of Tetlock’s more delicious discoveries was that the more famous experts – those who spent a lot of time as talking heads on television – were especially incompetent.Read more at location 161 •
The market has solved the problem of generating material wealth, but its secret has little to do with the profit motive or the superior savvy of the boardroom over the cabinet office. Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success, as successful ideas take off and less successful ones die out. When we see the survivors of this process – such as Exxon, General Electric and Procter & Gamble – we shouldn’t merely see success. We should also see the long, tangled history of failure, of all of the companies and all of the ideas that didn’t make it.Read more at location 239 •
Astounding complexity emerges in response to a simple process: try out a few variants on what you already have, weed out the failures,Read more at location 246 •
In fact, Stuart Kauffmann and John Holland, both complexity theorists affiliated with the multidisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, have shown that the evolutionary approach is not just another way of solving complex problems. Given the likely shape of these ever-shifting landscapes, the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions.Read more at location 299 •
We should not leap to conclusions based on an abstract mathematical model, but Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Apple might as well replace Steve Jobs with a dart-throwing chimpanzee – even though it would certainly liven up Apple product launches. But the evidence suggests that in a competitive environment, many corporate decisions are not successful, and corporations constantly have to cull bad ideas and search for something better.Read more at location 350 •
We will have to make an uncomfortable number of mistakes, and learn from them, rather than cover them up or deny they happened, even to ourselves. This is not the way we are used to getting things done.Read more at location 369 •
The Soviets failed at both: they found it impossible to tolerate a real variety of approaches to any problem; and they found it hard to decide what was working and what was not. TheRead more at location 415 •
What Palchinsky realised was that most real-world problems are more complex than we think. They have a human dimension, a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change. His method for dealing with this could be summarised as three ‘Palchinsky principles’: first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The first principle could simply be expressed as ‘variation’; the third as ‘selection’. The importance of the middle principle – survivability – is something which will become clear in chapter six, which explores the collapse of the banking system.Read more at location 442 •
If we are to take the ‘variation’ part of ‘variation and selection’ seriously, uniformly high standards are not only impossible but undesirable. When a problem is unsolved or continually changing, the best way to tackle it is to experiment with many different approaches. If nobody tries anything different, we will struggle to figure out new and better ways to do anything. But if we are to accept variation, we must also accept that some of these new approaches will not work well. That is not a tempting proposition for a politician or chief executive to try to sell.Read more at location 494 •
There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.Read more at location 517 •
All four examples – poker, Paris, Deal or No Deal and share portfolios – show a dogged determination to avoid crystallising a loss or drawing a line under a decision we regret. That dogged determination might occasionally be helpful, but it is counterproductive in all these cases and in many others. Faced with a mistake or a loss, the right response is to acknowledge the setback and change direction. Yet our instinctive reaction is denial. That is why ‘learn from your mistakes’ is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.Read more at location 590 •
The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you’ve failed.Read more at location 604 •
‘In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what they should have been … ’ – part of a sign on a command-post door in west Baghdad, commandeered by David PetraeusRead more at location 618 •
Friedrich Hayek in an article published in 1945. What Hayek realised, and Allende and Beer did not seem to, was that a complex world is full of knowledge that is localised and fleeting. Crucially, the local information is often something that local agents would prefer to use for their own purposes.Read more at location 1157 •
Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies. It is impossible to estimate a percentage return on blue-sky research, and it is delusional even to try. Most new technologies fail completely. Most original ideas turn out either to be not original after all, or original for the very good reason that they are useless. And when an original idea does work, the returns can be too high to be sensibly measured.Read more at location 1329 •
Grants, unlike prizes, are a powerful tool of patronage. Prizes, in contrast, are open to anyone who produces results. That makes them intrinsically threatening to the establishment.Read more at location 1715 •
‘Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.’ – Aza Raskin, designer at FirefoxRead more at location 3464 •
Disruptive innovations are disruptive precisely because the new technology doesn’t appeal to the traditional customers: it is different and for their purposes, it’s inferior. But for a small niche of new customers the new disruptive product is exactly what is needed. They want smaller, cheaper hard drives, or cameras that produce digital files, or email that you can access on any computer – and they are willing to tolerate the fact that the new product is inferior to the old one along all the traditional dimensions. That foothold in the niche market gives the new technology an opportunity to develop into a true threat to the old way of doing things.Read more at location 3778 •
researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.Read more at location 4025 •

The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini

A book exploring what constitutes the single 'I' that appears to be going on inside our heads.  As well as dipping into cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of self, the book looks ate various human case studies of individuals that give us insights into the system from those suffering from dementia, with various brain defects and damage, through to those with depression or undergoing gender reassignment.

In the end the book explains that what appears to us to be a singular self, is in fact just a trick, played on us by our brains as a complicated bundle of mental processes go about their daily function (normally with very little input or control from us).

To underestimate the extent to which the medium of our existence – the particular body each of us is given – shapes the person we become would be folly. But to think the person just is the medium is equally misguided. more at location 252
Unable to write or take notes, he had to think and remember what he wanted to say, and then dictate it to others. As a result, his memory improved considerably. But ‘The pleasures of mental agility are much over-stated, inevitably – as it now appears to me – by those not exclusively dependent upon them.Read more at location 303
The unity of the self is not to be explained in terms of a single, unified brain region, which acts as the master controller.Read more at location 385
Commissurotomy therefore seems to show that selves can be divided – at least temporarily – or that they needn’t have just one centre of consciousness after all.Read more at location 504
The unity and permanence we feel over time largely depends on our ability to construct an autobiographical narrative that links our experiences over time. But individual experiences and sense of self at any particular time can vary enormously. What is more, the autobiographical self is very good at self-revision. In effect, we are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner autobiographies coherent.Read more at location 566
To put it another way, the self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction, but one that can be brought down if the foundations are undermined.Read more at location 574
Many philosophers have argued that we are constituted by a psychologically continuous web of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories. Dementia says, well, okay, let’s pick that web apart, piece by piece and see if anything of you remains.Read more at location 630
We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world.Read more at location 694
They started from the correct idea that thoughts, feelings and sensations were not physical things. The category mistake was to conclude that they must therefore be a different kind of thing, a non-physical thing. But there is another, more plausible alternative: they are not things at all. Rather, thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. Mind should not be thought of a substance, but as a kind of activity.Read more at location 903
It’s a bit like a picture made up of hundreds of black and white dots. It could be that 90 per cent of the dots are identical, but the 10 per cent that differ create a totally different image.Read more at location 1177
‘The point of philosophy,’ wrote Bertrand Russell, ‘is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’1Read more at location 1647
The Ego Trick should be seen in this way. There is no single thing which comprises the self, but we need to function as though there were. As it happens, the mind, thanks to the brain and body, has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve that enable us to do this. Because it succeeds, selves really do exist. We only go wrong if we’re too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.Read more at location 1709
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it.Read more at location 1757
Hobbes’s famous example of the ship of Theseus.21 This vessel is taken into dry dock for repairs. The masts are broken, so these are replaced. The hull is rotting, so that too is rebuilt with new timber. Then it’s noticed the deck is looking a bit worn, so that too is replaced. And so on, until no parts of the ship are the same as when it came in. So is it the same ship? And what if someone took all the old bits and put them back together? Would that have a stronger claim to being the original ship of Theseus?Read more at location 1899
Everyone is familiar, I think, with the realisation that our competence to use a word accurately often exceeds our ability to define it precisely. Wittgenstein’s insight is that this is not paradoxical, but a reflection of the true nature of meaning itself.Read more at location 1953

Relax It's only uncertainty - Randall White

I heard the author lecture during some management training and when he gave us each a personal copy of the book, I thought I would at leats read it.

Written to accompany a self assessment tool of traits and techniques to manage in uncertain times, the book is readable and usable without completing that exercise.

p18 I liked the quote about the more senior you are and the more power you think you have in effect you have none - people choose to work for you and if you order them about for too long they will leave.

p39 the section about organisations and individuals really growing when they learn (and master) something difficult - something that cannot be easily learnt (copied) by others.

p44 Ask Why (and listen to the answer)

p101/102/103 about simplyfying your communications so that a sensible 7 year old could understand them.  reducing your message to <25 words
p157 get someone to summarise back what they think you just presented.

p119 the essecence of strategy is denial - choosing what not to do.

p151 a single day aim card - write down the ONE thing that I must achieve tomorrow to make the biggest improvement and keep the card on your desk during the day.

p193 leaders role as identifying productive areas of uncertaintity and leading teh organistion towards them to gain competitive advantage.  In uncertaintity is future wealth.

p194 to encourage learning, start by admitting (publicly) your mistakes.

p196 types of leader compared to star trek leaders

p200 the whole of the final chapter on the future of leadership is worth reading even if you cover nothing else in the book.