I think it's likely that the single most damaging human trait -- both economically and personally -- is the fear of failure (closely related to image maintenance, pride).
"Psychoanalytic theories are so preoccupied with biological questions of why, how, when, where, that they lose sight of the fact that the answers don't change anything." -Carl Hammerschlag
If Jesus were born in modern times, would he use Twitter, Facebook, and the like? Would he have a cell phone? Drive a car? If so, what kind? This is not a WWJD morality question, but an attempt to understand historical Jesus of Nazareth. There are all kinds of questions like this that fascinate me. Where would he shop for groceries? What would he eat? Would he "buy local" from the hippies at the farmers' market, or would he get bulk-sized packages of bagel bites from Costco? Would love to see the poll results on these questions.
"When people talk to you about why they believe, they are talking about an internal experience that they can't share with you. They just hope that you'll have a similar enough frame of understanding (bias), and similar enough internal experiences that it will make some sense to you." -Robert
The start up idea is a hypothesis, not a blueprint. Entrepreneurs must not be so in love with their idea that they are unwilling to change it. "Fast iteration is the key to success."
Just out of curiosity, I would like to see university and department rankings based on the aptitude of the professors. I do not mean their SAT or GRE scores from when they were students, but rather how they would perform on such IQ tests now.
We attribute others' actions too much to their personality characteristics, and not enough to the situation/context: "fundamental attribution error". Interestingly, attribution error does not appear until around age seven. It is most prominent in Western cultures because of the "we determine our destiny" meme. Eastern cultures see more role for fate and so attribute behaviors more to situation.
Just allowing people the opportunity to make decisions/control their environment makes them more engaged and leads to better results, regardless of whether they proactively change anything.
"Feelings are tools for understanding information we get. Our interpretation of them is both influenced by and contributes to our model of the Universe." -My friend Bob
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All squibs
An oral history of The Wire
2 hours ago
