We assume that what's in our head is plain to see to everyone around us. But the thoughts and feelings we have are invisible to others. And when we forget this, and communicate as if our inner world is on full display, conversations go wrong.
And so these two very smart real estate guys, not knowing the history, not knowing the complexities, they can parachute in and they can make peace because they're smart and they're quick and they're not burdened by all the baggage of the past.
We often assume that the people we're talking with see the world the way we do — and when they say something that seems strange or hostile, we interpret it through that lens. But much of the time, the other person is operating with an entirely different set of assumptions, and neither party realizes they're not actually having the same conversation.
People who blow up their lives often aren't doing something irrational — they're responding to a deep psychological need that their current life isn't meeting. The problem is that blowing up your life is a very blunt instrument for addressing that need.
the reasoning traces look remarkably similar to the work of an expert mathematician, including choosing promising approaches, backtracking when they fail, and combining ideas from across the literature.
A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it always is a product of planning and genius. Is it because they are lucky that [great men] become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck. What is luck? The ability to exploit accidents: The vulgar would call this luck, but in fact it is the characteristic of genius.
You need to separate the tech from the tech companies because then you're going to start finding interesting things like real experimentation and real people with values. Until you do that, you're just going to be stuck in the hype cycle.
To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime... the dog did nothing in the nighttime. That was the curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes nothing is very important.
Imagination is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. But if you don't use it, it gets weaker and your body will rely on something else to do it for you.
Most of us think we know what our partners want and need. But Epley's research suggests that we're often wrong — and that the solution isn't to try harder to read our partner's mind, but to simply ask.
Sometimes nothing is very important. Obviously, nothing's been very important to me. I've written books about it, but in this case, nothing happening is the central feature of symmetry.
Most of us think we know what our partners want and need. But Epley's research suggests we're not nearly as good at this as we think we are. We often fail to ask, and instead rely on assumptions that can be badly wrong.
Emotions are not just feelings — they're a form of information processing. When you feel anxious before a presentation, for example, that anxiety is telling you something about the situation, something you've detected, possibly without being fully conscious of it.
Most of us have been taught to think of emotions as the enemy of good thinking — that to reason well, we need to push our feelings aside and rely on cold, hard logic. But the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says this view is exactly backwards. Emotions, she argues, aren't a distraction from thinking. They're a fundamental part of how we think.
Most people assume that feelings are the enemy of clear thinking — that in order to make good decisions, we need to suppress our emotions and rely on cold logic. But the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered something surprising: people who lose the ability to feel emotions due to brain damage don't become more rational. They become less capable of making good decisions.
We often think of emotions as the enemy of clear thinking — the force that causes us to act impulsively, or to make decisions we later regret. But psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says this view is mistaken. Emotions, she argues, are not obstacles to rational thought — they are a necessary ingredient of it.
Most of us think of our feelings as secondary to reasoning — as things that cloud the mind and lead us astray. But research suggests that emotions don't just color our experiences; they actually give us access to information and insights that we would otherwise miss.
Most people think of emotions as the opposite of rational thinking. But the truth is that our feelings are deeply intertwined with our ability to reason — and people who lose access to their emotions due to brain damage often become incapable of making even simple decisions.
We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is. The spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder, from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now.
Feelings are not the opposite of rational thinking. They are, in many situations, a necessary component of it. People who lose the ability to feel emotions due to brain damage often struggle to make even the simplest decisions.
We tend to think of rationality and emotion as opposites — that feelings cloud our judgment and lead us astray. But the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that people who lose the ability to feel emotions due to brain damage also lose the ability to make good decisions.
People often think that emotions are the opposite of careful thinking — that feelings and rationality are at war with each other. But the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says this view is completely wrong. Our feelings, she argues, are not obstacles to good thinking, but essential ingredients of it.
Most comedians I know are very serious people. They don't naturally laugh when something's funny, because they're like mad scientists. They almost look at the math of it.
Emotions, he came to realize, aren't the enemy of rational thought. They are part of rational thought. Emotions are an evolved system of wisdom — a shorthand that allows us to make quick decisions based on a wealth of past experience.
People assume that emotions get in the way of good thinking. But the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that patients with damage to the emotional centers of the brain didn't become more rational — they became worse at making decisions. Without feelings to guide them, they got lost in endless deliberation, unable to choose between options.
Most of us think of emotions as the enemy of clear thinking — as biases that lead us astray. But researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett says this view has it exactly backwards. Feelings, she argues, aren't obstacles to good reasoning; they're essential ingredients of it.
We often think of feelings as the enemy of clear thinking — as forces that muddy the waters of rational analysis. But emotions, it turns out, are not the opposite of thought. They are a form of thought.
Emotions are not just feelings — they're a form of information. When you have a feeling, you're actually getting a signal about what's relevant, what's important, and what you might be missing. Suppressing that information comes at a cognitive cost.
We often think of emotions as the enemy of rational thought. But the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that people who had damage to the emotional centers of their brains didn't become better decision-makers — they became worse ones, unable to make even simple choices about what to eat for lunch or when to schedule an appointment.
Emotions are not the enemy of rational thinking. They are, in fact, essential to it. People who lose the ability to feel emotions due to brain damage often become terrible decision-makers, even when their logical reasoning remains intact.
Most people assume that feelings get in the way of clear thinking — that the ideal decision-maker is a kind of emotion-free calculator. But neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered something remarkable: patients who lost the ability to feel emotions due to brain damage also lost the ability to make good decisions, even when their reasoning abilities remained intact.
Most of us have been taught to think of emotions as noise in the system — interference that distorts the signal of pure reason. But what if we've had it exactly backwards? What if emotions aren't obstacles to good thinking, but essential ingredients of it?
We tend to think that the best decisions are made when we're calm and dispassionate — when we manage to push aside our feelings and focus on the facts. But neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered something remarkable: people who lose the ability to feel emotions due to brain damage also lose the ability to make good decisions.
Emotions are not just feelings — they're information. They tell you what you care about, what matters to you, what you should attend to in the environment. If you strip away your emotions, you don't become a better reasoner; you become a worse one.
Objectivity is just when you park your emotions and learn without judgment. I don't have to like it, I'm just here to learn from it. Neutrality negates your opinions as if you have no judgments.
Most of us intuitively understand that we are shaped by the unusual circumstances of our own lives. But we rarely think about the ways in which our era, our country, and our culture have shaped our beliefs, intuitions, and desires — making them feel universal when they are anything but.
Most of us think we know how to learn from our mistakes. We tell ourselves we'll do better next time, or we replay the failure in our minds, hoping the sting of embarrassment will motivate us to change. But research suggests these common responses are often the least effective ways to grow from our errors — and in some cases, they can actually make things worse.
We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. If you have a really challenging experience and you just move on, you're not going to get any wiser. You need to actually stop and reflect on what happened.
I think of computers a little like grandparents, actually. You wouldn't use your grandmother, right? But your grandmother can make your life easier if you use her properly.
Most people think of mistakes as unfortunate detours on the path to success. But researcher Karen Sokal-Gutierrez has found that the relationship between error and learning is more intimate than that — that mistakes aren't just inevitable, they're essential. Without them, we don't just learn more slowly; in some ways, we don't learn at all.
The bears say inference is a commodity and that we'll see severe margin compression. I think that's probably right in aggregate, but I think that also misses what happened in the cloud. Amazon and Microsoft and Google do sell compute as a commodity, but they make enormous profits doing so, because commodities at massive scale with high fixed costs and low variable costs can be very, very profitable businesses.
Most of us think the best response to failure is to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and try again. But researchers have found that this intuition is often wrong. What matters more is not the trying again, but the thinking — specifically, the kind of thinking we do about our mistakes before we make our next attempt.
Most of us think we know how to learn from our mistakes. We feel bad about them, we try to understand what went wrong, and we vow to do better. But researchers who study the science of errors say that what we think helps us learn from our mistakes often doesn't work — and some of the things we think are unhelpful actually do work.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
