📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring or positive reinforcement. One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.

Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

Two Models of Searching for Truth: Unearthing the Truth v.s. Growing Into The Truth Summary: Science is like carving away everything that isn't truth, but I think it's more like an infinite vacuum with trees growing in all directions. The search for truth is complex and ever-expanding. It's like ecology, where species have multiple solutions to a problem, which continually changes. I believe in infinite diversity and combinations, and that complexity can emerge from simplicity. Instead of focusing on the core, we should expect to branch out. Transcript: Speaker 2 One metaphor I like is that I think some people have as their image of science. Imagine we're sitting on the surface of a sphere, and they think they're kind of digging down to the core of the truth. They're discarding the earth beneath them, the falsities, and they're going to hit the truth. Speaker 1 We're carving away everything that isn't science, you're saying? Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that the image I have instead is there's an infinite vacuum outside of that sphere, and there are trees growing out from the surface of the sphere in all directions. And as they grow out, more space is available, and they branch and expand. And that just goes on, and it gets more and more complex the further you get out. And that's kind of how I think of the search for the truth. That strikes people maybe initially is a little bit weird. I guess that's how I interpret like beginning of infinity, David Deutsches' phrase. But another way to see that is ecology, the way the species were. Species are all after some abstracted fitness landscape, I guess is one way to conceive of it. But somehow we don't end up with one solution to that problem. In fact, we get a bunch of solutions to the problem, and as that problem gets solved, it actually changes the problem, because now for all the other species you've got to deal with, and There's other species that you can eat, there's all kinds of stuff going on. That's how I think about it. I eat reflecting infinite diversity and infinite combinations. I think that there's just a lot of things going on, and you can build a lot of complexity from a small set of ingredients. And you shouldn't expect to get down to the core, you should expect to branch out from the core.

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

To Eliminate Undesirable Behavior, You Have to Eliminate The Stimuli That Precedes It Summary: Self-control problems require structuring life to avoid stimuli that tempt bad behavior, similar to avoiding walking past a tavern if you're an alcoholic. Investors can improve mental hygiene by unfollowing negative sources and following those with a long-term perspective to reduce hyper reactivity to market fluctuations. Changing exposure helps in turning down the amplitude of emotions. Transcript: Speaker 1 But if you 're an alcoholic, you would be crazy to walk past the tavern and say, i will demonstrate the will power not to walk in. You can't do that, and you know you can't, so you walk on the other street. And that's the kind of governor that people need to put on their behavior. If you know that you have self control problems, you have to structure your life so that the things that tempt you into bad behavior don't get surfaced in your stimuli. And that's very easy for investors to do. If you, if you know you have a tendency toward hyper reactivity to, you know, red arrows pointing downward on stock market displays, then turn that web site off, un follow that person On twitter. Follow people who take a longer term perspective and aren't rattled by this kind of thing. Improve your mental hygiene. You can't turn yourself into someone who's unemotional, but you can turn down the amplitude of your own emotions if you change what your exposures are.

#4 Jason Zweig — Elevate Your Financial IQ

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

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