Goodreads
The book in 3 sentences:
Choose a problem, then choose a question. Then relentlessly try to answer that question iteratively. Do not let personal biases get in the way of cold hard statistical data helping you make the best possible choice in a situation.
Things to remember
▪ The absurdly talented George Bernard Shaw—a world-class writer and a founder of the London School of Economics—noted this thought deficit many years ago. “Few people think more than two or three times a year,” Shaw reportedly said. “I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
▪ ultracrepidarianism, or “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”
▪ That’s right: the herd-mentality incentive beat out the moral, social, and financial incentives.
▪ 1. Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about. 2. Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide. 3. Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different. 4. Whenever possible, create incentives that switch the frame from adversarial to cooperative. 5. Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the “right” thing to do. 6. Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.
▪ But this does help explain why a college degree remains so valuable. (In the United States, a worker with a four-year degree earns about 75 percent more than someone with only a high-school degree.) What sort of signal does a college diploma send to a potential employer? That its holder is willing and able to complete all sorts of drawn-out, convoluted tasks—and, as a new employee, isn’t likely to bolt at the first sign of friction.
▪ The hardest part of running the lab, he says, “is training people to understand that risk is part of their job, and if they fail well, they will be given the license to fail again. If we try to spend ten thousand dollars on our failures instead of ten million dollars, we’ll get the opportunity to do a lot more things.” In this context, Deane says, failure “has to be recognized as a victory.”
▪ But putting your faith in a coin toss—even for a tiny decision—may at least inoculate you against the belief that quitting is necessarily taboo.
â–Ş We are all slaves to our own biases.