Posts from ‘January, 2009’

Many speakers, especially novice speakers, are better off the cuff than speaking with prepared remarks. Everyone sounds like a human when they speak off the cuff, but it takes practice to sound like a human when giving prepared remarks. I suffered through a 20-minute long speech by a CEO-finance type, full of platitudes like “we [...]

Malcolm Gladwell is an excellent storyteller. He has a knack for finding great stories about people or firms that back up his points. But I object to his style of argument – in short, tell a story, tell another story, tell another story, make some point about some unique thing that all three stories have [...]

As a society, we tend to use an argument’s simplicity as a heuristic for its strength. When faced with two arguments, the simpler argument has a decided advantage. As a result we’re constantly pushed to make arguments shorter and more memorable. TV heads try to deliver 5 or 10-second sound bites to sell a policy [...]

We generally associate rationality with wanting to know more about our biases. Generally we associate learning about human bias with learning more in general; rational people are truth seekers. However, there are some instances when ignorance is a rational strategy. Off the top of my head:
1) The placebo effect
2) The role of God in everyday [...]

#1: Keep doing all of the good things I was doing last semester.
#2: If someone proposes a venture, plan, pickup game or trip, say “I’m in” every time. For this I turn to Paul Graham. “If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit [...]

Nate Silver’s speaking at Claremont McKenna in April. Nate invented PECOTA, the MLB player evaluation system, and runs the election blog FiveThirtyEight.com. I requested a few speakers last September and Nate was one of them. But I didn’t know CMC had booked anyone until I saw the schedule a few hours ago.
So, this is pretty [...]

Currently about 8 percent of people are left handed. Have levels of left-handedness always been this low or is right hand dominance a recent trend? In the Middle Ages left-handedness was a "sinister" sign, indicating that you were marked by the devil. Before machinery I can’t see any advantage to conforming to a societal norm [...]

Nearly 95% of restaurants have menus that are too long. There are three problems with big menus:
1. Quantity hurts quality – the more dishes the restaurant will cook, the less likely the restaurant is good at cooking any of them.
2. In general people feel twice as much pain when losing something as they do joy [...]

When giving talks to student crowds he likes to sum up his entire approach to life as a two-step process: “(1) Get started; (2) Keep going.”
From Study Hacks. There’s no substitute for doing.

I’m taking a course in macroeconomics this semester. The teacher began the class by taking roll and then asking everyone what they thought were some important issues in macroeconomics. Other students mentioned that market efficiency, GDP, and international trade were important issues. I wanted to raise my hand to say that determining whether macroeconomists know [...]