"people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say"

Understanding what people feel is difficult. We are starting to be able to measure it, but until we can, do not rely on people to tell you what they want, because they don't completely know. The parts of the brain that do the feeling aren't really connected to the parts that do the talking. A very large amount of psychology assumes, an awful lot of business activity assumes, that we have mental access to our unconscious motivations and desires, when in truth they're what's known as opaque to introspection. You can't find it out.

businesses tend to over-optimize for measurable engineering metrics (speed, capacity, cost) while ignoring the psychological factors that actually drive human behavior

Strategy is the alignment of potentially aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities

homo economicus

an idealized model of human behavior, a hypothetical creature (/caricature) who makes perfectly "rational" decisions, where "rational" is a well-defined game-theoretic concept meaning (roughly) self-interested and utility-maximizing. In other words, a Homo economicus — of which no actual instances exist, but which every real human being approximates to a greater or lesser extent — will always, to the best of its available knowledge, make the decisions which maximize expected outcomes according to its own preferences.

Ads target us not as Homo sapiens, full of idiosyncratic quirks, but as utility-maximizing Homo economicus.

emotional inception

Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions. They work by creating positive associations between the advertised product and feelings like love, happiness, safety, and sexual confidence. These associations grow and deepen over time, making us feel favorably disposed toward the product and, ultimately, more likely to buy it. A rather Pavlovian account of ad efficacy

cultural imprinting

Cultural imprinting is the mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings — which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product. Whether you drink Corona or Heineken or Budweiser "says" something about you. But you aren't in control of that message; it just sits there, out in the world, having been imprinted on the broader culture by an ad campaign. It's then up to you to decide whether you want to align yourself with it. Do you want to be seen as a "chill" person? Then bring Corona to a party. Or maybe "chill" doesn't work for you, based on your individual social niche — and if so, your winning (EV-maximizing) move is to look for some other beer. But that's ok, because a successful ad campaign doesn't need to work on everybody. It just needs to work on net — by turning "Product X" into a more winning option, for a broader demographic, than it was before the campaign.

The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?"

"The vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man."

This most fundamental problem of human life is so easy to overlook because our entire lives are made of the coping strategy. So much of what we seek is solely to flee the experience of being here. People buy things they don’t need, start fights with their partners, eat when they’re not hungry, and scroll miserable and inane content, just to escape the feeling of existence as it already is.

This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear. There’s always something wrong, even when everything’s fine. It’s as if you can only bear the present moment when you’re trying change it into something else.

This is the strange condition of the human being. It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment. In order to cope with this allergy, it perpetually seeks things: feelings and experiences that are not yet present. It wants to always be getting the hell out of here.

We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done. This challenging of basic assumptions is essential to breakthroughs.

... People trying to understand what makes their world tick so that they can make it better. As they think logically and consistently about their problems they are able to determine cause and effect relationships between their actions and the results. In the process they deduce some basic principles which they use to save their plant and make it successful.

Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightfor-ward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.
The Law of Conservation of Energy of physics is not truth. It is just an assumption that is valid in explaining a tremendous amount of natural phenomena. Such an assumption can never be proven since even an infinite number of phenomena that can be explained by it does not prove its universal application. On the other hand, it can be disproved by just a single phenomenon that cannot be explained by the assumption. This disproving does not detract from the validity of the assumption. It just highlights the need or even the existence of another assumption that is more valid.

As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.

Objects have their shape and weight, their color, and beyond this a dimension for which there is no scale, their importance.

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible? Why, whenever I am idle, sometimes even before, in the midst of doing something, do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts.

I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone.

Some thoughts a few chapters in:

• the prose is so lyrical. there is no connective tissue, it's all jump cuts. no establishing shots. Dreamlike, feverish (vivid, yet vague at the same time), pure sensation instead of information.
• why does this remind me of Pulp Fiction

Do you know the word otium in Latin, meaning, “doing nothing”? The Roman people were all laid back. In all the pictures, they were all laying around. They were doing nothing, just staring. In the winter on a Sunday afternoon, I can spend six hours in front of the fireplace, just looking at the flames and thinking. In the evening, I’m drunk with beautiful thoughts. My wife says to me, “What are you looking at?” I say, “The fire.” We have to take a step backward.

“a theory of good judgment”: self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving situations, more circumspect about their forecasting prowess, more accurate in recalling mistakes, less prone to rationalize those mistakes, more likely to update their beliefs in a timely fashion, and—as a cumulative result of these advantages—better positioned to affix realistic probabilities in the next round of events