#super thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''Suppose the police pull someone over at random at a drunk-driving checkpoint and administer a Breathalyzer test that indicates they are drunk. Further, suppose the test is wrong on average 5 percent of the time, saying that a sober person is drunk. What is the probability that this person is wrongly accused of drunk driving?

Your first inclination might be to say 5 percent. However, you have been given the probability that the test says someone is drunk given they are sober, or P(Test=drunk | Person=sober) = 5 percent. But what you have been asked for is the probability that the person is sober given that the test says they are drunk, or P(Person=sober | Test=drunk). These are not the same probabilities!

What you haven’t considered is how the results depend on the base rate of the percentage of drunk drivers. Consider the scenario where everyone makes the right decision, and no one ever drives drunk. In this case the probability that a person is sober is 100 percent, regardless of what the Breathalyzer test results say. When a probability calculation fails to account for the base rate (like the base rate of drunk drivers), the mistake that is made is called the base rate fallacy.''

-Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''More generally, you must continually try to strike the right balance between order and chaos as you interact with your environment. If you let the chaos subsume you, then you will not make progress in any particular direction. But if you are too ordered, then you will not be able to adapt to changing circumstances and will not have enough luck surface area to improve your chances of success. You want to be somewhere in the middle of order and chaos, where you are intentionally raising your personal entropy enough to expose yourself to interesting opportunities and you are flexible and resilient enough to react to new conditions and paradigms that emerge. If you study the biographies of successful people, you will notice a pattern: luck plays a significant role in success. However, if you look deeper, you will notice that most also had a broad luck surface area. Yes, they were in the right place at the right time, but they made the effort to be in a right place. If it wasn’t that particular place and time, there might have been another. Maybe it wouldn’t have resulted in the same degree of success, but they probably would have still been successful.''

-Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''People are susceptible to the black-and-white fallacy because of the natural tendency to create us versus them framings, thinking that the only two options are ones that either benefit themselves at the expense of “others,” or vice versa. This tendency arises because you often associate identity and self-esteem with group membership, thereafter creating in-group favoritism and, conversely, outgroup bias. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner established research in this area, published as “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior” in Political Psychology in 2013, that has since been corroborated many times. It showed that with the tiniest of associations, even completely arbitrary ones (like defining groups based on coin tosses), people will favor their “group.”

Outside the lab, this tendency toward in-group favoritism often fosters false beliefs that transactions are zero-sum, meaning that if your group gains, then the other group must lose, so that the sum of gains and losses is zero. However, most situations, including most negotiations, are not zero-sum. Instead, most have the potential to be win-win situations, where both parties can actually end up better off, or win. How is this possible? It’s because most negotiations don’t include just one term, such as price, but instead involve many terms, such as quality, respect, timing, control, risk, and on and on.''

-Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''Seen through the lens of entropy, your time, if left unmanaged, will start to go to random, largely reactionary activities. You will get pulled into the chaotic systems that surround you. Instead, you need to manage your time so that it is in a state of lower entropy. When you are able to make time for important activities, you are more easily able to adapt to your changing environment because you have the ability to allocate time to a particular important activity when needed.''

-Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''On a more practical level, the second law (of thermodynamics) serves as a reminder that orderliness needs to be maintained, lest it be slowly chipped away by disorder. This natural progression is based on the reality that most orderliness doesn’t happen naturally. Broken eggs don’t spontaneously mend themselves. In boiling water, an ice cube melts and never re-forms as ice. If you take a puzzle apart and shake up the pieces, it isn’t going to miraculously put itself back together again. You must continually put energy back into systems to maintain their desired orderly states. If you never put energy into straightening up your workspace, it will get ever messier. The same is true for relationships. To keep the same level of trust with people, you need to keep building on it.''

-Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''If you want greater luck surface area, you need to relax your rules for how you engage with the world. For example, you might put yourself in more unfamiliar situations: instead of spending the bulk of your time in your house or office, you might socialize more or take a class. As a result, you will make your own luck by meeting more people and finding more opportunities. Thinking of the butterfly effect, you are increasing your chances of influencing a tornado, such as forming a new partnership that ultimately blossoms into a large, positive outcome.

You obviously have to be judicious about which events to attend, or you will constantly be running to different places without getting any focused work done. However, saying no to everything also has a negative consequence—it reduces your luck surface area too much. A happy medium has you attending occasional events that expose you to people who can help you advance your goals. Say no often so you can say yes when you might make some new meaningful connections.

...

...increasing your luck surface area means increasing your personal maximum entropy, by increasing the possible number of situations you put yourself in. Your life will be a bit less orderly, but disorder in moderation can be a good thing. Of course, as we have seen so far, too much of a good thing can also be a bad thing. Too much entropy is just chaos.''

-Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''There are likely design patterns applicable to whatever you are doing…For writing books like this, there are many design patterns, from the way the book is laid out and printed to the length and writing style expected. The same is true in our careers: design patterns for startups (how they are commonly financed, managed, etc.), coding (how code is structured, common algorithms, etc.), and biostatistics (common drug trial designs, statistical methods, etc.).

The opposite of the well-tested design pattern is the anti-pattern, a seemingly intuitive but actually ineffective “solution” to a common problem that often already has a known, better solution. … You can avoid anti-patterns by explicitly looking for them and then seeking out established design patterns instead.

While some amount of planning is always useful, sometimes the most efficient way to finish a task is to dive in quickly and start, rather than getting bogged down in analysis paralysis.''

-Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking