Code Switch

Does a high IQ make you smart?

When you look at coding, it requires you to be logical and have a very mathematical brain. That's just one dimension to intelligence, but it's considered so valuable and important to Silicon Valley. And so I think when they look at these things and they look at these SAT scores and maths, it's self-serving because that's the stuff that they're good at. That's the stuff that served them well and now they run the world and you know, so we're living in their world.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Cliff Sosin - Owning the Complements to Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.497]

Intelligence is probably one of those things where there's a certain level you need, but beyond that, the marginal returns are pretty low. And actually the things that matter much more are the complements to intelligence — things like work ethic, emotional stability, intellectual honesty, and the ability to sit with uncertainty.

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

We are, in some sense, living inside of stories. We have a story about who we are, a story about our relationship, a story about what the world is like. And these stories shape what we see and what we don't see, what we remember and what we forget.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Cliff Sosin - Owning the Complements to Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.497]

Intelligence is probably the most overrated trait in investing. The thing that actually matters is whether you can sit with uncertainty, whether you can be wrong for a long time and still hold your position, and whether you have the emotional stability to not panic when things go against you.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Cliff Sosin - Owning the Complements to Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.497]

Intelligence is probably not the binding constraint on investment performance. The binding constraint is much more likely to be things like emotional stability, patience, the ability to hold an unpopular view, or the willingness to be wrong for a long time before being right.

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we communicate with each other, and how we understand ourselves. But stories can also mislead us, by making the world seem more coherent and predictable than it really is.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Cliff Sosin - Owning the Complements to Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.497]

Intelligence is probably the thing people spend the most time thinking about in this business, and I think it's one of the least important factors in long-run success. The returns to intelligence are just not that high in investing, and the reason is that markets are pretty efficient.

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

Stories are so central to how we think that psychologists have found we don't just consume them passively — we use them to construct our own sense of self. The 'narrative identity' theory holds that we each build and constantly revise an internalized story of our own life that incorporates the past, present, and imagined future, and that this story is our identity.

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

We understand the world through the lens of narrative. When someone offers us a story, our defenses come down; we are transported into another world, and in that world, we update our beliefs and feelings. Stories don't just reflect reality — they shape it.

TED

Why It’s So Hard to Listen When You Disagree | Emily Kasriel | TED

We've bought into a dangerous myth -- listening means agreeing. Listening means agreeing. So we avoid it, and instead, we fixate on trying to explain ourselves more loudly, more fiercely, more insistently.

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we connect with others, and how we understand ourselves. But our love of stories has a dark side: it can distort our thinking, make us vulnerable to manipulation, and cause us to ignore evidence that doesn't fit our preferred narrative.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

a chronic lack of good sleep can also affect how we make decisions and even what we value

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Sleep researchers have found that when we lie awake at night, ruminating about our problems, we're not actually solving them. We're just rehearsing them. The very effort we put into trying to sleep — or trying to solve our problems — can backfire, keeping us alert and awake.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

When people are worried about not sleeping, they often do things that make the problem worse. They go to bed earlier, they cancel social engagements, they nap during the day, and they lie in bed tossing and turning. All of this is completely understandable, but it profoundly disrupts the body's ability to consolidate sleep.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

When you're sleep-deprived, you're often the last to know it. People who get six hours of sleep think they're doing just fine, but when you test them, they're performing as badly as people who've been awake for 24 hours straight.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

When we try harder and harder to sleep, we make it more difficult. Trying to force sleep is like trying to force yourself to feel relaxed or trying to force yourself to feel hungry — the act of trying itself is counterproductive.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

When people feel anxious about sleep, they may start doing things like lying in bed for hours hoping to fall asleep, or napping during the day to compensate for lost sleep at night. These behaviors feel intuitive, but they often backfire — and can actually make insomnia worse over time.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Most people think of sleeplessness as a problem to be solved — a deficit to be corrected. But the anxiety we feel about not sleeping can itself become the thing that keeps us awake, transforming a single bad night into a chronic condition.

Throughline

Can the polygraph test really spot a lie? | Throughline

The machine itself is a bit of what magicians call the misdirect. You're all focused on the machine, but it's actually the questions and the rituals and the penumbra, all the things that are going on around it, which make the polygraph successful in quote marks.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Most of us have been told that we need to get eight hours of sleep a night. But Grandner says this advice can actually make insomnia worse. When you're worried about getting enough sleep, you start trying harder and harder to sleep — and that effort to sleep is actually what prevents you from sleeping.

Radiolab

The Smell of Hell

Just the smell of it is an alarm bell that says, "something here is dangerous." But what if our noses have been wrong all along?

Diet TBPN

Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, AI Data Center Forecast Jumps, Poppi’s Pepsi Deal | Diet TBPN

Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED talk era came to an end and people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook and in the most scrutinized field there is medical technology. When people ask how she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in and she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

sleep researcher Chris Barnes says a chronic lack of good sleep can also affect how we make decisions and even what we value.

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Most people, when they can't sleep, do the very things that make their insomnia worse. They lie in bed trying to sleep — which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We tend to think that if we're unhappy, it's because something bad has happened to us, or because we lack something we want. But research suggests that a lot of unhappiness comes from something we're doing to ourselves — constantly comparing our lives to the lives of others.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We tend to think that what we want will make us happy. But psychologists have found that we're remarkably bad at predicting what will actually bring us satisfaction. We imagine that major life events — a promotion, a new relationship, a bigger house — will transform our happiness, but their effects are often smaller and shorter-lived than we expect.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We want to get the thing we're comparing our life to, but when we get it, we start comparing ourselves to the next rung up the ladder. So there's this moving goalpost that keeps shifting higher and higher, and that's really the hedonic treadmill.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We think if we just get that next thing — the promotion, the relationship, the house — we'll finally be happy. But the research suggests that we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy, and we're especially bad at knowing how long that happiness will last.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

Most of us believe that we know what we want. We imagine that if we just got that thing — the job, the relationship, the house — we'd be happy. But research suggests that we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy, and that we often adapt to good things far more quickly than we expect.

Book of the Day

'Swan Song' sees Princess Diana through her brother’s eyes | NPR's Book of the Day

Being told all the way through your school years that you are somehow less than the rest of the people in your class must have had a devastating effect on her. I also come to the conclusion, you know, which is fairly it was very obvious that she had this incredible burden from this criticism from teachers about being at the very low end in each subject she studied. How could you not feel that you were somehow inadequate?

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We tend to think that if we just had a better job, a better house, a better partner, we'd finally be happy. But research suggests that we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy — and more importantly, we're not very good at understanding why we're unhappy in the first place.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We assume that if we just get that promotion, or find that perfect partner, or move to that new city, we'll finally be happy. But research suggests that we're wrong about what will make us happy, and we're also wrong about how long that happiness will last.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We assume that other people who are happy are in a fundamentally different situation than we are — that they have things we don't have, or they don't have problems that we do. But the research suggests that happy people have essentially found ways to make peace with the same kinds of problems and shortcomings that unhappy people struggle with.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We tend to think that if we're unhappy, something must be wrong with our lives. But research suggests the opposite is also true: when we're unhappy, we look for things that are wrong with our lives. Our emotional state shapes what we perceive and remember, so that unhappiness itself can generate the very evidence we use to explain it.

Hidden Brain

Why Am I Unhappy?

We often imagine that feelings of unhappiness come from outside us — in our circumstances or the difficult people in our lives. But what if the forces that erode our happiness come from within?

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Most of us believe that bad things shouldn't happen to good people, and when they do, we struggle to make sense of it. But psychologists have found that this belief — sometimes called the 'just world hypothesis' — can lead us to blame victims for their own misfortune, because it's more comforting to think that people get what they deserve than to accept that life is fundamentally unpredictable.

The Week

Stocks Hit a Record High While Bonds Flash Red. Who’s Right? | The Week

It's why markets do create bubbles because it's not that people are stupid. It's not that people don't understand that you can spend too much and overbuild data centers. Of course, they get that. But the risk of not doing it is that you fall competitive space that is moving at the speed of light across the globe.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

We tend to think that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. And when a good person suffers, we're forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that the world doesn't work the way we'd like it to.

Daily Stoic

We Have Entered A New Gilded Age, This Is Why | Nathaniel Philbrick

Those who uh don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. And I am here before you today to say even if you know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. Because the you know the if when you're in the moment, you have no historical perspective. You see things in terms of your your impulses, your your you know what's good for you.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Most of us think that bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people. When something terrible happens to someone, it's natural to wonder what they did to deserve it. But this way of thinking can lead us to blame victims for their misfortune, and to feel a false sense of security that we ourselves are safe from harm.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

We tend to think of justice as something that exists in the world — that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When we see someone suffering, it's natural to assume they must have done something to deserve it. But this belief, psychologists have found, can cause us to blame the victims of misfortune rather than help them.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Most of us believe that good things should happen to good people and bad things should happen to bad people. When bad things happen to us, we expect others to rush to our side and help us cope. But psychologists have found that this is often not what happens. When bad things happen to good people, we often find that others don't come to help — and may in fact make things worse.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Most of us are quick to help others in distress, but we also, at some level, blame them for their misfortune. If victims could have avoided their fate, then we can avoid it too. But if they did nothing to bring it on themselves, then we are just as vulnerable as they were — and that's a terrifying thought.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

When bad things happen to good people, we tend to assume that victims must have done something to deserve their fate. This belief in a just world—the idea that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get—can be deeply comforting. But it comes at a cost: it leads us to blame the innocent and ignore the role of chance in human life.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

We tend to assume that bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people. When we encounter someone who has suffered a terrible fate through no fault of their own, it can shatter this comfortable illusion — and rather than update our beliefs, we often unconsciously blame the victim instead.

EconTalk

Addiction, Faith, and the Limits of Willpower (with Meghan O'Gieblyn)

the choices that most shape our lives are the "choices in between the choices," or the ones we barely notice making at all.

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Most of us assume that negative experiences will harm us, and positive experiences will help us. But psychologists have found that bad experiences are often more instructive than good ones — we learn more from our failures than from our successes, and we grow more from adversity than from ease.

TED Radio Hour

The women missing from music

The first thought that crossed my mind was this, oh, I bet this is just a big list. It doesn't mean their work was any good. And then I was immediately shocked with my own thought because I went, what? Why did I think that?

Hidden Brain

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Most of us believe that bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people. We call this the 'just world hypothesis.' The problem is that it's not true — and our commitment to this belief can lead us to blame victims of misfortune, rather than help them.