Smart Choices by Hamond, Keeney, Raiffa

• The essence of our approach is divide and conquer: break your decision into its key elements; identify those most relevant to your decision; apply some hard, systematic thinking; and make your decisions.
• Our approach is practice, encouraging you to seek out decision-making opportunities rather than wait for problems to present themselves.
• In short, the ability to make smart choices is a fundamental life skill.
• Despite the importance of decision making to our lives, few of us ever receive any training in it. So we are left to learn from experience. But experience is a costly, inefficient teacher that teaches us bad habits along with good ones.
• An effective decision-making process will fulfill these six criteria:
• It focuses on what’s important.
• It is logical and consistent.
• It acknowledges both subjective and objective factors and blends analytical with intuitive thinking.
• It requires only as much information and analysis as is necessary to resolve a particular dilemma.
• It encourages and guides the gathering of relevant information and informed opinion.
• It is straightforward, reliable, easy to use, and flexible.
• Hard decisions are hard because they’re complex, andnoone can make that complexity disappear. But you can manage complexity sensibly.
• The acronym for these--PrOAT--serves as a reminder that the best approach to a decision situation is a proactive one.
• Problem
• Objectives
• Alternatives
• Consequences
• Trade Offs
• The worst thing you can do is wait until a decision is forced on you--or made for you.
• The essence of the PrOACT approach is to divide and conquer. To resolve a complex decision situation, you break it into these elements and think systematically about each one, focusing on those that are key to your particular situation. Then you reassemble your thoughts and analysis into a smart choice.
• Your alternatives represent the different courses of action you have to choose from.
• Assessing frankly the consequences of each alternative will help you to identify those that best meet your objectives--all your objectives.
• What you decide today could influence your choices tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow should influence your choices today. Thus many important decisions are linked over time.
• The key to dealing effectively with linked decisions is to isolate and resolve near-term issues while gathering the information needed to resolve those that will arise later.
• By sequencing your actions to fully exploit what you learn along the way, you will be doing your best, despite an uncertain world, to make smarter choices.
• First and foremost, always focus your thinking on why it matters most.
• Typically, for all but the most complex decisions, you will not need to consider all the elements in depth. Usually, only one or two elements will emerge as the most critical for the decision at hand.
• Be proactive in your decision making. Look for new ways to formulate your decision problem. Search actively for hidden objectives, new alternatives, unacknowledged consequences, and appropriate tradeoffs.
• Most importantly, be proactive in seeking decision opportunities that advance your long-range goals; your corevaleus and beliefs; and the needs of your family, community, and employer.
• Take charge of your life by determining which decision you’ll face and when you’ll face them.
• The way you state your problem frames your decision. It determines the alternatives you consider and the way you evaluate them. Posing the right problem drives everything else.
• A good solution to a well-posed decision problem is almost always a smarter choice than an excellent solution toa poorly posed one.
• The greatest danger in formulating a decision problem is laziness.
• Every decision problem has a trigger--the initiating force behind it. Triggers take many forms.
• Be proactive. Seek decision opportunities everywhere.
• As you explore the trigger, beware! Triggers can bias your thinking. They can trap you into viewing the problem only in the way it first occurred to you.
• Question the constraints in your problem statement.
• Problem definitions usually include constraints that narrow the range of alternatives you consider.
• Questioning the problem is particularly important when circumstances are changing rapidly or when new information becomes available. A poorly formulated decision problem is a trap. Don’t fall for it.
• By making sure you’ve identified all your objectives, you will avoid making an unbalanced decision--one that, for example, considers financial implications but ignores personal fulfillment.
• Sometimes, the process of thinking through and writing out your objectives can guide you straight to the smart choice--without your having to do a lot of additional analysis.
• For important decisions, only deep soul-searching will reveal what really matters--to you. This kind of self-reflective effort perplexes many people and makes them uncomfortable.
• The cleanest and most easily communicated form for objectives is a short phrase consisting of a verb and an object.
• Many people mistakenly focus on immediate, tangible, measurable qualities when listing objectives, but these may not reflect the essence of the problem.
• Alternatives are the raw material of decision making. They represent the range of potential choices you'll have for pursuing your objectives. Because of their central importance, you need to establish and maintain a high standard for generating alternatives.
• You can never choose an alternative you haven’t considered.
• No matter how many alternatives you have, your chosen alternative can be no better than the best of the lot.
• One of the most common pitfalls is business as usual.
• Business as usual results from laziness and an overreliance on habit. With only a modest amount of effort, attractive new alternatives can usually be found.
• Many poor choices result from falling back on a default alternative.
• Choosing the first possible solution is another pitfall.
• People who wait too long to make a decision risk being stuck with what’s left when they finally do choose. The best alternatives may no longer be available.
• Remember, get an early start on major decisions. Take charge.
• Many decision problems have constraints that limit your alternatives. Some constraints are real, others are assumed.
• An assumed constraint represents a mental rather than a real barrier.
• One way to increase the chance of finding good, unconventional alternatives is to set targets that seem beyond reach.
• High aspirations force you to think in entirely new ways, rather than sliding by with modest changes to the status quo.
• Setting high aspirations stretches your thinking.
• Start thinking about your decision problem as soon as possible; don’t put it off until the last minute. Once you’ve begun, make a point of thinking about the problem from time to time to give your subconscious a nudge.
• Create alternatives first, evaluate them late.
• Creating a good alternative requires receptivity--a mind expansive, unrestrained, and open to ideas. One idea leads to another, and the more ideas you entertain, the more likely you are to find a good one.
• Bad ideas will almost certainly emerge along with good ones. That’s a necessary part of the process and something you shouldn’t be concerned about at this point.
• Don’t evaluate alternatives while you’re generating them. That will slow the process down and dampe creativity.
• Never stop looking for alternatives. As the decision process moves on to the consideration of consequences and tradeoffs, the evaluation stages, your decision problem will become increasingly clear and more precisely defined.
• Information helps dispel the clouds of uncertainty hovering over some decisions.
• When there are uncertainties affecting a decision, it is useful to generate alternatives for gathering the information necessary to reduce each uncertainty.
• First list the areas of uncertainty. Then, for each one, list the possible ways to collect the needed information. Each of these ways is an information-gathering alternative.
• Whenever you’re uncomfortable about deciding now, questions the deadline. Is it a real deadline, or is it just an assumed constraint?
• It’s an unfortunate truth: the perfect solution seldom exists. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people from endlessly (and unrealistically) pursuing one.
• Be sure you really understand the consequences of your alternatives before you make a choice. If you don’t you surely will afterwards, and you may not be very happy with them.
• The main benefit to be derived from describing consequences is understanding.
• The trick is to describe the consequences with enough precision to make a smart choice, but not to go into unnecessary and exhausting detail.
• Eliminate any clearly inferior alternatives. This step is a terrific time saver for many decisions because it can quickly eliminate alternatives and may lead to a resolution of your decision.
• Important decisions usually have conflicting objectives--you can’t have your cake and eat it too--and therefore you have to make tradeoffs. You need to give up something on one objective to achieve more in terms of another.
• Decisions with multiple objectives cannot be resolved by focusing on any one objective.
• Ben Franklin proposed a wonderful way to simplify a complex problem. Each time he eliminated an item from his list of pros and cons, he replaced his original problem with an equivalent but simpler one. Ultimately, by honing his list, he revealed a clear choice.
• Whenever uncertainty exists, there can be no guarantee that a smart choice will lead to good consequences.
• A risk profile captures the essential information about the way uncertainty affects an alternative.
• For most uncertainties, there will probably be someone out there who knows more about it than you do. Seek out an expert and elicit his or her judgement.
• Pinpoint precision usually isn’t required in assigning chances. Frequently, knowing that a chance falls within a certain range is sufficient for guiding a decision.
• Decision trees are especially useful for explaining decision processes to others.
• Getting into the habit of skethin decision trees, even for relatively simple decisions involving uncertainty, can enhance your decision-making skills.
• Your risk tolerance expresses your willingness to take risk in your quest for better consequences. It depends primarily on how significant you consider the downside--the poorer consequences of any decision--compared to the up side.
• The more likely the outcomes with better consequences and the less likely the outcomes with poorer consequences, the more desirable the risk profile to you.
• Weight desirabilities by chances. More fully stated: weight the desirabilities of the consequences by the chances of their associated outcomes.
• Outcomes with a low chance of occurring should have less influence on an alternatives overall desirability than outcomes with a high chance of occurring.
• When uncertainty is significant, develop a risk profile for each alternative which captures the essence of the uncertainty.
• Think hard and realistically about what can go wrong as well as what can go right.
• An organization’s leaders should take three simple steps to guide subordinates in dealing successfully with risk. First, sketch desirability curves that reflect the risk-taking attitude of the organization. Second, communicate the appropriate risk tolerance by issuing guidelines that include examples of how a typical risky decision should be handled.
• Third, examine the organization’s incentives to ensure they are consistent with the desired risk-taking behavior.
• When a good opportunity feels too risky, share the risk with others.
• Seek risk-reducing information.
• Try to temper risk by seeking information that can reduce uncertainty.
• Diversify the risk.
• Avoid placing all your eggs in just a few baskets. Look for ways to diversify.
• Wherever a risk consists of a significant but rare downside, with no upside, try to insure against it. But don’t overinsure.
• All decisions affect the future, of course.
• Making smart choices about linked decisions requires understanding the relationships among them.
• The essence of making smart linked decisions is planning ahead.
• Makers of effective linked decisions, like successful chess players, plan a few decisions ahead before making their current decision.
• A good quick test to weed out information-gathering alternatives is to ask what you’d pay to completely resolve the uncertainty. If an information alternative costs more, it’s an obvious non contender.
• Flexible plans keep your options open.
• In highly volatile situations, where the risk of outright failure is great, an all-purpose plan is often the safest plan.
• Sometimes the best plan is to act in a way that expands your set of future alternatives.
• Just knowing how sets of decision are linked and using a modest amount of foresight can help considerably in making a smart choice and can practically guarantee avoiding many, if not all, of the dumb ones.
• Over time, making smart choices on linked decisions will affect your life and career more positively and profoundly than making perfect choices on all your simpler decisions put together.
• By now you’re much better prepared to identify and avoid the eight most common and most serious errors in decision making:
• Working on the wrong problem.
• Failing to identify your key objectives.
• Failing to develop a range of good, creative alternatives.
• Overlooking crucial consequences of your alternative.
• Giving inadequate thought to tradeoffs.
• Disregarding uncertainty.
• Failing to account for your risk tolerance.
• Failing to plan ahead when decisions are linked over time.
• Researchers have identified a whole series of such flas in the way we think.
• The best protection against these traps is awareness.
• In considering a decision, the mind gives disproportionate weight to the first information it receives. Initial impressions, ideas, estimates, or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts.
• You’ll be less susceptible to anchoring tactics.
• Never think of the status quo as your only alternative. Identify other options and use them as counterbalances, carefully evaluating al theri pluses and minuses.
• The past is past; what you spent then is irrelevant to your decision today.
• Remember, your decision influences only the future, not the past.
• Expose yourself to conflicting information. Always make sure that you examine all the evidence with equal rigor and understand its implications. And don't be soft on the disconfirming evidence.
• In seeking the advice of others, don’t ask leading questions that invite confirming evidence.
• The same problem can also elicit very different reponsinse when frames use different reference points.
• A poorly framed problem can undermine even the ebay-considered decision. But the effect of improper framing can be limited by imposing discipline on the decision making process.
• Don’t automatically accept the initial frame, whether it was formulated by you or by someone else.
• Always try to reframe the problem in different ways. Look for distortions caused by the frames.
• A major cause of overconfidence is anchoring. When you make an initial estimate about a variable, you naturally focus on midrange possibilities. This thinking then anchors your subsequent thinking about the variable, leading you to estimate an overly narrow range of possible values.
• In fact, anything that distorts your ability to recall events in a balanced dway will distort your probability assessment for estimates.
• Where possible, try to get statistics. Don’t rely on your memory if you don’t have to.
• When you don’t have direct statistics, take apart the event you’re trying to assess and build up an assessment piece by piece.
• Analyze your thinking about decision problems carefully to identify any hidden or unacknowledged assumptions you mahe have made.
• Don’t ignore relevant data; make a point of considering base rates explicitly in your assessment.
• Consider the methodology of “worst-case analysis”, which was once popular in the design of weapons systems and is still used in certain engineering and regulatory settings.
• Documents the information and reasoning used in arriving at your estimates, so others can understand them better.
• To avoid distortions in your thinking, you must curb your natural tendency to see patterns in random events. Be disciplined in your assessments of probability.
• Highly complex and highly important decisions are the most prone to distortion because they tend to involve the most assumptions and the most estimates. The higher the stakes, the higher the risks.
• The best protection against all psychological traps is awareness. Forewarned is forearmed. Even if you can’t eradicate the distortions ingrained in the way your mind works, you can build tests and disciplines into your decision-making process that can uncover and counter errors in thinking before they become errors in judgement.
• Procrastination is the bane of good decision making.
• Deciding By default, by not deciding, almost always yields unsatisfactory results, if only because you spend time wondering if you could have done better. So get started. The sooner you start, the more likely it is that you’ll give your decision adequate thought and find adequate information, rather than being forced to decide in partial ignorance under pressure from the clock.
• Large corporations and the military use this technique, making strategic decisions first, tactical decisions second, and operational decisions last.
• Obsessing over your decision takes a tool in time and psychological energy, but a hasty decision, rushed to avoid emotional stress or hard mental work, is usually a poor decision.
• Seldom does a perfect solution exist, yet too many people endlessly (and unrealistically) pursue one.
• Often, the imagined need for more analysis becomes an excuse for procrastination, for avoiding a decision, because deciding will require accepting some bad along with the good.
• To make a decision beyond your sphere of expertise, you’ll often need to seek advice from others.
• Many of your toughest decisions aren’t as hard as they look. By being systematic and focusing on the hard parts, you can resolve them comfortably.
• Over time luck favors people who follow good decision making procedures.
• Most important, always remember: the only way to exert control over your life is through your decision making. The rest just happens to you.
• Be proactive, take charge of your decision making, strive to make good decisions and to develop good decision-making habits.

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by Fugere, Hardaway, Warshawsky

• Let’s face it: business today is drowning in bullshit. We try to impress (or confuse) investors with inflated letters to shareholders. We punish customers with intrusive, hype-filled, self-aggrandizing product literature. We send elephantine progress reports to employees that shed less than two watts of light on the big issues or hard truths.
• There is a gigantic disconnect between these real, authentic conversations and the artificial voice of business executives and managers at every level.
• Bull has become the language of business.
• Entire careers can be built on straight talk--precisely because it is so rare.
• The first reason for obscurity is a business idiot’s focus on himself over the reader.
• When obscurity pollutes someone's communications, it’s often because the author’s goal is to impress and not to inform.
• A second reason people fall into the obscurity trap, and ultimately speak like idiots, is a fear of concrete language.
• In business, we like to avoid commitment. Liability scares us, so we add endless phrases to qualify our views on a topic, acknowledging everything from prevailing weather conditions, to the twelve reasons we can’t make a decision now, to the reason we all agree the topic is important, to the reason why decisions in general require a lot of thought, and so on.
• The third move for obscurity is a business idiot’s relentless attempt to romanticize whatever it is that they do for a living.
• The bottom line: Bullshit eats away at your personal capital, while straight talk pays dividends.
• If someone is onto their incompetence, there’s nothing like some indigestible prose to keep everyone off their trail. And it seems that those at the highest levels of the corporate food chain (supposedly the smartest folks around) are the worst offenders.
• Every profession, even professional bowling, has some subset of words that helps its gurus share their genius in a kind of shorthand.
• When you have nothing to say, jargon is the best way to say it.
• Business people have an incredibly difficult time delivering a tough message, and usually find a way to surround the real nuggets of information with layer upon layer of muck.
• Some acronyms are useful and welcome.
• Acronyms for the sake of acronyms breed acrimony and mass confusion.
• Jargon is the foundation of obscurity. It’s only part of the long slide into idiocy, but if you want to connect with your audience and persuade them, word choice is a good place to start.
• So the single most important things you can do to kick the argon habit is to develop a deep and vitriolic hatred of it.
• Length is supposed to imply insight, but usually the opposite is true.
• Beyond shortness in length, the best speakers also seem to get away with  a lot shorter words (those of the one and two syllable variety).
• The real issue with long-windedness is that it prevents you from connecting with your audience.
• Short presentations pack a punch.
• Short sentences are more memorable than long ones.
• One-syllable words build momentum and give the long ones impact.
• Business idiots have become commitaphobe. They live in constant fear of being held accountable for something tangible and throw together generic statements that sound vaguely positive but really say nothing.
• In business, the real epidemic is obscurity. Only the best leaders seem to be able to resist turning into a mound of Jello when it comes time to actually say something that could be taken as a stand.
• One of the major reasons that business people speak like idiots is that they have lost their human voice. We have allowed our personalities to be systematically neutered and spayed into oblivion.
• Businesses love clones because they can all be trained the same way, be paid the same way, and eventually behave the same way. If a clone leaves, a business can always hire another at the same salary.
• Templates steal your opportunity for individual expression. It’s one way of surrendering your creative powers to software, and a sure way to fall into the anonymity trap.
• Avoiding the anonymity trap is all about making a personal connection with your audience. Templates are your enemy. Humour is your ally.
• The polish we apply to all our performances is one of the downfalls of business presentations.
• Scripting is good--but know your script, and then ad lib a bit--just don’t read from it, or people will tune you out.
• People with a sense of humor rise through the ranks faster and earn more money. It’s a sign of self-confidence and security--a sign that you can afford a moment of levity, because you don’t have to hard-sell everyone on your talent.
• Humor defuses conflict, reduces tension, and puts others at ease because sharing a laugh is a sign of friendship, not competition.
• The bottom line: Humor makes us happy, makes people like us more, and ultimately helps us connect with an audience (whether on paper or in person).
• The top reason people avoid humor at work is because it might offend someone, and this isn’t a stup reason.
• Society is think-skinned, as a rule, and it is fashionable to be oppressed. People actually aspire to victimhood, because it’s a great way to retire young and well-off.
• Self-deprecation is indispensable. The more successful you are, the better it works.
• Humor almost always brings some risk, but remember: it’s always, always open season on yourself.
• Storytelling is a key ally in the fight against the tedium trap, but it’s also indispensable when it comes to humor.
• Oddball, seemingly unrelated quotes are a great way to flex your humor.
• The voice is the ultimate weapon in the war on anonymity and the best way to create a relationship.
• If you want to connect with your audience, keep in mind that people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy.
• Hard sell gets in the way and erodes trust.
• People just seem to like an idea better when they think it’s their own.
• There aren’t many leaders who can deliver bad news with candor. The ability to do this well confers a lot of prestige on the messenger. It demands courage, and immediately lets the audience know that you trust them enough to just say what needs to be said.
• The old rule is to never present a problem without a solution. But there’s an even better rule--never present a problem without actually doing something that represents a positive step to fix it.
• Show momentum toward an answer, even if you don’t know what the answer is.
• Authenticity, promptness, and clear action are the stuff that effective apologies are made of.
• Business people who live by denial appear ignorant, egotistical, and dishonest.
• The harder you go on yourself, the easier others will go on you.
• Business idiots spend their lives delivering the fine print to audiences who don’t really care. Sometimes the message is timely and smart, sometimes it’s the usual bill, but whatever--they assume the audience exists to take notes.
• In real life, though, the audine isn’t there to take notes. We’re continually surfing our environment for something cool.
• If you want to connect with an audience, you have to get their attention. Make it relevant. Make it vivid. Make it compelling. Whether you like it or not, you’re in the entertainment business. If you don’t find a way to keep their attention, someone or something else will.
• Back up the assertion with something real and tangible, or don’t bother making it.
• Subtly can be the difference between good communicators and great ones.
• Most business people think their goal is to get people to pay attention. Not bad, but not good enough. Great communicators get people to think.
• Your goal is to create a rapport with an audience, to show them that your thoughts aren’t so different from theirs. You have the same preoccupations, annoyances, and reactions to life that they do, and you care enough to entertain them.
• What you should be worried about is what your audience is worried about.
• One of the biggest reasons business people speak like idiots is that they spend way too much time talking about what’s in their head and not nearly enough time on what might be floating around in the minds of their audience.
• To your audience, everything you say is irrelevant until it touches on something they care about.
• One way to reveal your humanity is to reveal a weakness. Exposing a weakness builds trust and solidarity. It underscores a person’s authenticity.
• The key to success here is to be authentic.
• Sometimes, simple props are all you need to tell a memorable story.
• Storytelling is a fundamental part of being human. We have only a limited capacity to absorb facs, but an enormous capacity to absorb narratives.

Conspiracies Declassified by Brian Dunning

• Too often, proposed conspiracy theories are so uselessly vague that they are always going to be true.
• The ultimate conspiracy theory is that the Illuminati runs the world, and that all governments and corporations are willingly subservient to the secret powers that be. It is the conspiracy theory that best satisfies our most primal need to believe that everything happens for some reason, according to some place; that there is a method to every apparent madness; and that we ourselves are the ultimate targets of this simmering malevolence.
• Whenever the rich, the powerful, or world leaders gather, a natural reaction among the more paranoid is that they're up to something malevolent.
• Overgrown government control is the ultimate validation of our native paranoia.
• Vaccines are the single most important and successful public health initiative. They are responsible for saving more lives than any other medical intervention in history.
• Throughout the twentieth century, schools began requiring vaccinations before students would be allowed to attend. Because children are the most vulnerable to disease, and schools are where children are most likely to infect one another, this policy is actually one of the most important public health initiatives on the books.
• Vaccination is science's greatest achievement in the fight against disease. No other public health measure comes close.
• It turns out that vaccines are among the least profitable products that pharmaceutical companies make.
• Is it true that autism is more common now than it used to be? No. Or more accurately, there is no evidence of that. It is true that far more cases are being diagnosed today than used to be. There are two reasons for this. First is that the definition of autism spectrum disorders keeps getting broadened as we recognize more and more cases to be connected. Second is that the stigma of being autistic is going away, and parents are more likely to allow their children to be tested and diagnosed than they used to be. So while we do indeed have more diagnoses being reported, there is no reason to suspect that the actual prevalence of autism is higher today than ever before.
• Just because a compound is natural does not mean that it's safe, but the toxicity level of every compound is determined by the dose.
• The contrails you see behind airlines are normal and unavoidable condensation created by the plan burning hydrocarbon fuel in certain high-altitude conditions. No chemtrails are needed to explain them.
• Whenever some person of prominence dies, there's almost always somebody whose agenda is accidentally satisfied. This, of course, makes it really easy to paint anyone who's benefited from the death as a murder suspect. This is the basic genesis of every conspiracy theory surrounding the mysterious death of someone famous.
• A crucial point is the conspiracy theorists' use of the phrase "official story". These are weasel words, used disparagingly to cast doubt without actually saying anything of substance.
• Anti-semitism is, sadly, a cornerstone of many conspiracy theories.
• Holocaust denial is often done by citing vast stores of trivial minutiae: factoids or extrapolations that are so many and varied as to give the impression of comprising an impregnable vault of proof.
• The only driver common to all Holocaust-denying authors is anti-Semitism.
• Any scientist knows that science is a continually self-correcting process. In good science, all conclusions are provisional, and they are always subject to change if new information turns up.
• As with all large conspiracy theories, we should consider the number of people who would have to be in on the truth in order to make it happen.
• Although many obvious fats don't seem to be worth explaining it's always interesting to learn how we know what we know.
• Free energy machines do not and cannot exist, as the laws of physics make them impossible. Specifically, the laws of thermodynamics state thaw when energy is drawn from a system, the system is left with less energy. You can't drink water from a glass and have the glass still remain full.
• The fundamental reason that free energy machines can never work is hinted at in their name. They produce something from nothing. The way the universe works is defined by physical laws--and those laws don't work that way.
• Cancer is not a single disease, but many hundreds of different diseases with different causes and different treatments. There could never be one single cure for all cancers any more than there could be one single fox for all possible automobile mechanical problems, so this idea that there is a single wonder drug in some pharmaceutical company's vault is simply fiction.
• Area 51 is an actual place. Formally, it is called the National Classified Test Facility inside Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and its existence has always been public. The large, flat surface of dry Groom Lake makes it an ideal place for long runways.
• In order to sustain a thermonuclear reaction, a star needs to have a mass greater than about 0.08 solar masses, otherwise it will to have enough gravity to squeeze its core into a mass hot and dense enough.
• Conspiracy theorists typically take evidence that disproves their theory and say it's falsified, and then point to it and say, "Look! It's a cover up!"
• In science, we often point to the law of large numbers when confronted with a manifestation that appears unlikely. This law refers to the mathematical probability of highly unlikely events popping up at predictable intervals.
• The tendency of our brains to spot faces in ordinary objects is called pareidolia. It is an evolved trait in all animals to help us recognize our parents and others of our kind. If we didn't have pareidolia, we would never be able to recognize cartoon characters as being people.

WIN BIGLY by Scott Adams

• Winning fixes most problems.
• Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill.
• The common worldview, shared by most humans, is that there is one objective reality, and we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason.
• When you identify as part of a group, your opinions tend to be biased toward the group consensus.
• A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.
• If you don’t sample the news on both sides, you miss a lot of the context.
• When your old worldview falls apart, it can trigger all kinds of irrational behavior before your brain rewrites the movie in your head to make it consistent with your new worldview.
• Persuasion is all about the tools and techniques of changing people’s minds, with or without facts and reason.
• Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone’s cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.
• Humans are hardwired to reciprocate kindness.
• Persuasion is effective even when the subject recognizes the technique.
• The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.
• Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.
• The Master Persuader moves energy and attention to where it helps him most.
• An intentional “error” in the details of your message will attract criticism. The attention will make your message rise in importance—at least in people’s minds—simply because everyone is talking about it.
• If you have ever tried to talk someone out of their political beliefs by providing facts, you know it doesn’t work. That’s because people think they have their own facts. Better facts.
• If you are not a Master Persuader running for president, find the sweet spot between apologizing too much, which signals a lack of confidence, and never apologizing for anything, which makes you look like a sociopath.
• A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.
• Success cures most types of “mistakes.”
• An anchor is a thought that influences people toward a persuader’s preferred outcome.
• Cognitive dissonance is a condition of mind in which evidence conflicts with a person’s worldview to such a degree that the person spontaneously generates a hallucination to rationalize the incongruity.
• Confirmation bias is the human tendency to irrationally believe new information supports your existing worldview even when it doesn’t.
• The key idea behind a filter is that it does not necessarily give its user an accurate view of reality.
• Moist robot is my framing of human beings as programmable entities.
• A persuasion stack is a collection of persuasion-related skills that work well together.
• Cialdini’s two best-selling books, Influence (1984) and Pre-Suasion (2016), are master classes in the irrational nature of human decision making.
• Much of what we know to be true by experiment makes absolutely no sense to our limited human brains.
• Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts.
• The main theme of this book is that humans are not rational. We bounce from one illusion to another, all the while thinking we are seeing something we call reality. The truth is that facts and reason don’t have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.
• As a general rule, irrational people don’t know they are irrational.
• Once you understand your experience of life as an interpretation of reality, you can’t go back to your old way of thinking.
• Humans don’t always need to know the true nature of reality in order to live well.
• Hypnotists see the world differently. From our perspective, people are irrational 90 percent of the time but don’t know it.
• When our feelings turn on, our sense of reason shuts off.
• When you experience cognitive dissonance, you spontaneously generate a hallucination that becomes your new reality.
• It is easy to fit completely different explanations to the observed facts. Don’t trust any interpretation of reality that isn’t able to predict.
• Confirmation bias is the human reflex to interpret any new information as being supportive of the opinions we already hold.
• If you don’t understand confirmation bias, you might think new information can change people’s opinions. As a trained persuader, I know that isn’t the case, at least when emotions are involved. People don’t change opinions about emotional topics just because some information proved their opinion to be nonsense. Humans aren’t wired that way.
• Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system.
• Evolution doesn’t care if you understand your reality.
• Mass delusions are influencing every one of us all the time. Until the spell is broken, you can’t tell you are in one.
• People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.
• Smart CEOs try to create visible victories within days of taking the job, to set the tone. It’s all about the psychology.
• Remember what I taught you in the past year: Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel.
• The best leaders are the ones who understand human psychology and use that knowledge to address the public’s top priorities.
• The reality one learns while practicing hypnosis is that we make our decisions first—for irrational reasons—and we rationalize them later as having something to do with facts and reason.
• One of the things I’ve learned as a lifelong student of persuasion is that false memories are common. And sometimes adults don’t tell the truth.
• Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe.
• Persuasion is strongest when the messenger is credible.
• Guess what people are thinking—at the very moment they think it—and call it out. If you are right, the subject bonds to you for being like-minded.
• If you want the audience to embrace your content, leave out any detail that is both unimportant and would give people a reason to think, That’s not me. Design into your content enough blank spaces so people can fill them in with whatever makes them happiest.
• Love, romance, and sex are fundamentally irrational human behaviors, and it helps to see them that way.
• A talent stack is a collection of skills that work well together and make the person with those skills unique and valuable.
• The power of the talent stack idea is that you can intelligently combine ordinary talents together to create extraordinary value.
• Whenever you see people succeeding beyond your expectations, look for the existence of a well-engineered talent stack.
• Our brains interpret high energy as competence and leadership (even when it isn’t).
• Our brains did not evolve to understand reality. We’re all running different movies in our heads. All that matters is whether or not your filter keeps you happy and does a good job of predicting.
• Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words.
• Use the High-Ground Maneuver to frame yourself as the wise adult in the room. It forces others to join you or be framed as the small thinkers.
• We humans like to think we are creatures of reason. We aren’t.1 The reality is that we make our decisions first and rationalize them later.2 It just doesn’t feel that way to us.
• Analogies are a good way to explain a new concept.
• While analogies are useful and important for explaining new concepts, here’s the important point for our purposes: Analogies are terrible for persuasion.
• When you attack a person’s belief, the person under attack is more likely to harden his belief than to abandon it, even if your argument is airtight.
• The first thing you hear about a new topic automatically becomes an anchor in your mind that biases your future opinions.
• If you compare any two things long enough, their qualities start to merge in our irrational minds.
• If you want to influence someone to try a new product, it helps to associate it with some part of an existing habit.
• The main way habits come into play for politics is in the way we consume news.
• Studies say humans more easily get addicted to unpredictable rewards than they do predictable rewards.
• Humans reflexively support their own tribe. No thinking is involved.
• Credibility, of any sort, is persuasive.
• When you signal your credentials, people expect you to have more influence over them.
• It is easier to persuade a person who believes you are persuasive.
• Pre-suading, or setting the table, is about creating mental and emotional associations that carry over.
• Bring high energy. People with high energy are more persuasive. We’re all drawn to energy.
• Whenever there is mass confusion and complexity, people automatically gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice.
• Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave.
• People prefer certainty over uncertainty, even when the certainty is wrong.
• Visual persuasion is more powerful than nonvisual persuasion, all else being equal. And the difference is large.
• Humans are visual creatures. We believe our eyes before we believe whatever faulty opinions are coming from our other senses.
• In the context of persuasion, you don’t need a physical picture if you can make someone imagine the scene.
• That’s one of a persuader’s most basic and well-known tricks: People automatically gravitate toward the future they are imagining most vividly, even if they don’t want the future they are seeing.
• Visual memory overwhelms any other kind of memory, and vision is the most persuasive of your senses.
• You can use the power of contrast to improve every part of your professional and personal life.
• Participate in activities at which you excel compared with others. People’s impression of you as talented and capable compared with the average participant will spill over to the rest of your personal brand.
• People are more persuaded by contrast than by facts or reason. Choose your contrasts wisely.
• When you associate any two ideas or images, people’s emotional reaction to them will start to merge over time.
• A great sentence sounds good—in a way that music sounds good—independent of the meaning.
• Persuaders know that humans put more importance on the first part of a sentence than the second part. Our first impressions are hard to dislodge.
• People automatically get used to minor annoyances over time.
• People can get past minor annoyances if you give them enough time. Humans quickly adapt to just about anything that doesn’t kill them.
• One of your brain’s best features is its ability to automatically get over your smaller problems so you can focus on your bigger ones.
• What you say is important, but it is never as important as what people think you are thinking.
• A good system gives you lots of ways to win and far fewer ways to fail.
• If you can frame your preferred strategy as two ways to win and no way to lose, almost no one will disagree with your suggested path because it is a natural High-Ground Maneuver.
• Trump likes to tell us that many people agree with whatever he’s telling us at the moment. That’s an example of “social proof” persuasion. Humans are wired to assume that if lots of people are saying the same thing, it must be true.
• If you are selling, ask your potential customer to buy. Direct requests are persuasive.
• One of the rules of selling is that at some point in the pitch you have to directly ask for what you want.
• Repetition is persuasion. Also, repetition is persuasion. And have I mentioned that repetition is persuasion?
• Match the speaking style of your audience. Once they see you as one of their own, it will be easier to lead them.
• Trump’s simple speaking style made him relatable to the average undereducated voter.
• First you match your audience to gain their trust. Then you can lead them. This is powerful persuasion.
• Our minds are wired to believe that the simplest explanation for events is probably the correct one.
• Simple explanations look more credible than complicated ones.
• Simplicity makes your ideas easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to spread. You can be persuasive only when you are also memorable.
• “Strategic ambiguity” refers to a deliberate choice of words that allows people to read into your message whatever they want to hear. Or to put it another way, the message intentionally leaves out any part that would be objectionable to anyone. People fill in the gaps with their imagination, and their imagination can be more persuasive than anything you say.
• Once you join a side—for anything—it kicks your confirmation bias into overdrive.
• It is easy to fit the facts to the past in a way that supports a number of theories.
• PERSUASION TIP 31 If you are trying to get a decision from someone who is on the fence but leaning in your direction, try a “fake because” to give them “permission” to agree with you. The reason you offer doesn’t need to be a good one. Any “fake because” will work when people are looking for a reason to move your way. But
• Good writing is also persuasive writing.
• Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.
• Simple means getting rid of extra words.
• Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words.
• Your first sentence needs to grab the reader.
• Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.