Some lovely quotes from the book, “Alchemy: The Dark Art an…

1. The economy is not a machine – it is a highly complex system. Machines don’t allow for magic, but complex systems do. Engineering doesn’t allow for magic. Psychology does.

2. When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic.

3. The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.

4. Human behaviour is an enigma. Learn to crack the code.

5. To avoid stupid mistakes, learn to be slightly silly.

6. More data leads to better decisions. Except when it doesn’t.

7. Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak.

8. We could never have evolved to be rational – it makes you weak.

9. If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.

10. The record of science in some ways casts doubt on a scientific approach to problem-solving.

11. Be careful before calling something nonsense.

12. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.

13. Evolution doesn't care about objectivity. It only cares about fitness.

14. For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead, it needs to concentrate on what people feel.

15. You don’t need reasons to be rational.

16. In trying to encourage rational behaviour, don’t confine yourself to rational arguments.

17. Logic should be a tool, not a rule.

18. To put it crudely, when you multiply bullshit with bullshit, you don’t get a bit more bullshit – you get bullshit squared.

19.Don’t design for average.

20.A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident.

21.We should test counterintuitive things – because no one else will.

https://t.co/re2gwdidKZ the physical sciences, cause and effect map neatly; in behavioural sciences, it is far more complex. Cause, context, meaning, emotion, effect.

23. The more data you have, the easier it is to find support for some spurious, self-serving narrative. The profusion of data in the future will not settle arguments: it will make them worse.

24. In psychology these laws do not apply: one plus one can equal three.

25. In maths it is a rule that 2 + 2 = 4. In psychology, 2 + 2 can equal more or less than 4. It’s up to you.

26. If you declare something highly exclusive and out of reach, it makes us all want it much more – call it ‘the elixir of scarcity’.

27. Never forget this: the nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience.

28. Politeness demands that we perform hundreds of little rituals, from opening doors to standing up when someone enters the room, all of which is more effortful than the alternative. By such oblique means, we convey that we care about their opinion – and about our reputation.

29. If rationality were valuable in evolutionary terms, accountants would be sexy. Male strippers dress as firemen, not accountants; bravery is sexy, but rationality isn’t.

30. The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.

31. Branding isn’t just something to add to great products – it’s essential to their existence.

32. To recalibrate our immune response to levels appropriate to the more benign conditions we experience in everyday modern life, it may be necessary to deploy some benign bullshit.

33. What really is and what we perceive can be very different.

34.Behaviour comes first; attitude changes to keep up.

35.Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.

36. This is not irrationality – it is second-order social intelligence applied to an uncertain world. By using a simple economic model with a narrow view of human motivation, the neo-liberal project has become a threat to the human imagination.

37.If we could resist the urge to be logical just some of the time, and devote that time instead to the pursuit of alchemy, what might we discover? Quite a lot of lead, I suspect. But a surprising amount of gold.

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This thread is just a trailor. If you want to watch the full movie, please please read the book.

You will never regret buying it.

End