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everyone’s preferences, and feed all this data into a “single mind”—a giant economic optimization algorithm that would run continuously to “work out the implications”? Because, Hayek explained, that algorithm would never get all the data it actually needed; it could never “secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for

Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson • Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

When we strive to be everywhere and do everything, we tend to feel like we’re not fully experiencing anything. If we’re not careful and protective of our attention, it can seem like we’re losing control of our lives, bouncing from one distraction to the next... A common example of heroic individualism’s futile efforts to get more done faster at the... See more

Brad Stulberg • The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul

Schwartz’s research, and a considerable amount of scholarship from other social scientists too, shows that when we have more options, we are actually less satisfied and sometimes even have a harder time making a choice at all.

Eric Klinenberg • Modern Romance

The scheme worked because the pain of having Thaler cash the check and have a party at David’s expense was more salient than the rather abstract and pallid forgone contribution to his retirement savings plan.

Cass R. Sunstein • Nudge: The Final Edition

For example, when Thaler asked people whether they would drive twenty minutes out of their way to save five dollars on a fifteen-dollar calculator, 68 percent of respondents said yes. However, when he asked people whether they would drive twenty minutes out of their way to save five dollars on a $125 leather jacket, only 29 percent said they would.

Jonah Lehrer • How We Decide

The beautiful thing about defaults is that they beat almost any competing product – even if that competitor has strong network effects or is technically superior.

Julian Lehr • The Power of Defaults

The reason I’ve just made you read a thousand words about trees (bet you didn’t think you were going to do that today) is that it illustrates the problems of taking a complex system and applying a simple process to it in order to optimize a single metric.

Which brings us back to business: there are a huge number of complex systems in a business, wh... See more

taylorpearson.me • The Illegible Margin: Profiting From the Gap Between the Map and the Territory

Our behaviour is known as “hyperbolic discounting” and it helps explain why we are generally poor at saving for retirement.

Laurence Endersen • Pebbles of Perception: How a Few Good Choices Make All The Difference

benefits apply only to future workers. Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo in the lives of both institutions and individuals. This conservatism helps keep us stable in our neighborhood, our marriage, and our job; it is the…

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