Strategy Boffins

Idea Almanac

Daily update on new ideas and books so that you can grow each day

December 23, 2021

Idea Almanac

Gift of words

“Like most young kids emulating their hip-hop idols, I had been writing verses full of curse words and slick, slangy vulgarities, and I had accidentally left my book out in the kitchen.
Gigi found it and read it. She never said anything to me, but she wrote me a note on the inside front cover.

Dear Willard,

Truly intelligent people do not have to use language like this to express themselves. God has blessed you with the gift of words. Be sure you are using your gifts to uplift others. Please show the world that you are as intelligent as we think you are.
Love,
Gigi”

Excerpt From: Will Smith. “Will.”

December 22, 2021

Idea Almanac

Constraints are the third ingredient, after causality and counterfactuals

“Constraints are the third ingredient, after causality and counterfactuals, for framing to work. Without constraints, we might imagine an enormous range of alternative realities that are so ill-connected to the causal mental model that they fail to inform our actions. We need the right boundaries for our imagination to elicit the choices we have. Constraints are rules and restrictions that shape our counterfactual thinking in a particular way. We can play with them—by loosening or tightening them, and by adding new ones or removing old ones. With constraints, framing goes from the purview of cognition to the basis of actions that matter.”

Excerpt From: Kenneth Cukier. “Framers.”

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December 21, 2021

Idea Almanac

Story-study-story-study structure

What’s the secret to writing like Malcolm Gladwell?
It’s a puzzle that has consumed a generation of nonfiction writers. Ever since Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point, debuted on the New York Times best-seller list in 2000, where it resided for a staggering four hundred weeks, countless writers across a range of disciplines have attempted to crack the code. Certain patterns are obvious. There is the story-study-story-study structure that is now a fixture of popular nonfiction, the novelistic flair used to bring central characters to life, and the sticky simplicity with which complex ideas are communicated, transformed from lifeless data into irresistible dinner party ammunition.

Excerpt From: Ron Friedman. “Decoding Greatness.”

December 20, 2021

Idea Almanac

Hofstadter’s law

“The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning – to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need – could actually make matters worse.”

Excerpt From: Oliver Burkeman. “Four Thousand Weeks.”

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December 19, 2021

Idea Almanac

Emissions need to fall by a minimum of 8 per cent year on year

When the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere is greater than the amount we remove (as has been the case for over a century), the stock of carbon dioxide increases. To stabilise temperature rises below 1.5°C, at 2°C or indeed at any temperature, we must reach net zero – the balance where the carbon emitted and taken out of the atmosphere is equal. Net zero isn’t a slogan, it’s an imperative of climate physics.To get on the path to stabilise temperatures at 1.5°C, emissions need to fall by a minimum of 8 per cent year on year over the next two decades. To put that into context, total CO2 emissions for 2020 (which incorporated full-scale, Covid-19-induced shutdowns of our economies) decreased by around 5 to 7 per cent. To be clear, even at this crisis-reduced rate, we are continuing to spend our carbon budget, and we are not on track to meet our temperature goals.

Excerpt From: Mark Carney. “Values.”

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December 18, 2021

Idea Almanac

Words so bloodless, so fleshless and so empty of Matter

“There were two opposing concepts. Chrysippus the philosopher intermingled not merely passages from other authors into his writings but entire books: in one he cited the whole of the Medea of Euripides! Apollodorus said that if you cut out his borrowings his paper would remain blank. Epicurus on the other hand left three hundred tomes behind him: not one quotation from anyone else was planted in any of them. The other day I chanced upon such a borrowing. I had languished along behind some French words, words so bloodless, so fleshless and so empty of matter that indeed they were nothing but French and nothing but words.”

Excerpt From: Michel de Montaigne. “The Complete Essays.”

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December 17, 2021

Idea Almanac

Models that can be translated into intuitive insights

“The authors argued that the models were so complex that their outputs could produce results that the unaided human brain could not possibly understand intuitively. Richard and I taught just the opposite. While a model can yield a result that might not have been obvious, an analyst’s job is not complete until he or she can decipher the intuition behind the unexpected result – and be able to explain it to decision and policy makers in plain language (maybe with the help of a diagram or two). Models whose results remain a mystery are not useful; models that can be translated into intuitive insights and be broadly understood can be useful”

Excerpt From: Dan Levy. “Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser.”

December 16, 2021

Idea Almanac

The Puzzled Centipede

“You are not consciously aware of the vast majority of your brain’s ongoing activities, and nor would you want to be—it would interfere with the brain’s well-oiled processes. The best way to mess up your piano piece is to concentrate on your fingers; the best way to get out of breath is to think about your breathing; the best way to miss the golf ball is to analyze your swing. This wisdom is apparent even to children, and we find it immortalized in poems such as “The Puzzled Centipede”:
A centipede was happy quite,
Until a frog in fun
Said, “Pray tell which leg comes after which?”
This raised her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.”

Excerpt From: Eagleman, David. “Incognito.”

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December 15, 2021

Idea Almanac

A theory of strings of symbols

“When in the late 1940s C.E.Shannon created Information Theory there was a general belief he should call it Communication Theory, but he insisted on the word “information”, and it is exactly that word which has been the constant source of both interest and of disappointment in the theory. One wants to have a theory of “information” but it is simply a theory of strings of symbols. Again, all we suppose is there is such a source, and we are going to encode it for transmission.”

Excerpt From: Richard R. Hamming. “Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn.”

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December 14, 2021

Idea Almanac

We are here to salute our distinctions

“We are not here to tolerate our differences,
we are here to accept them.
We are not here to celebrate our sameness,
we are here to salute our distinctions.
We are not born into equal circumstances,
or with equal abilities,
but we should have equal opportunity.
As individuals, we unite in our values. Celebrate that.”

 

Excerpt From: Matthew McConaughey. “Greenlights.”

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