I enjoyed reading Why We Should Design Some Things to Be Difficult to Use by Brian Millar for WIRED. It caught my attention and held it by referencing Dan Pink’s book Drive. I posted his TED Talk on Drive back in 2009. The sections of the piece: The Pleasures of Mastery Difficulty Makes Things Exclusive Danger May…
A while ago I posted a review about the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. The message of the book, I think, is critically important, but the book wasted my time with too many anecdotes and testimonials which are a taboo in science writing. The good parts remain where Dweck wrote about her own and…
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck My rating: 2 of 5 stars I wanted to learn more about how to use the growth mindset. I personally tend to fall too much into the fixed mindset. Only this book fell too much into the Self-Help traps: “This is how I am. What…
A recent event reminded me I should read Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I picked it up in August to read, but since my copy is a hard back the Georgia heat would warp it, so I left it forgotten in the bedside table. So here I am, thoroughly…
Better Answers & How I Learned to Defrag My Brain first posts this video on Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Then it moves on to talking about Johnson’s blog post The Spark File. (Doesn’t Getting Things Done have something similar?) We have outgrown our ability to remember everything that…
An The Atlantic article, Dating on the Autism Spectrum, I read last weekend sent me reading more about the Autism Spectrum again. This would be the fourth or fifth time. In my cache of saved articles, I found a link to a NYT piece called Navigating Love and Autism, which suggests not that long ago…
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) This one combines the worst of Illusions and Math. We trust our senses and inadequately assess risk. We have limited capacities for attending to what happens around us. Two or more objects are not being held at the same time in memory. We switch between…
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) Behavioral economics fascinates me. Humans have amazing abilities to miscalculate risk with extreme confidence they accurately assessed it. These appear to be rules of thumb which work in certain situations, but really are not applicable to others yet most people do. Part of the…
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) Homo Sapiens Sapiens cheated evolution in one critical way by creating language. Rather than rely totally on instincts passed along by genes, we pass along an enormous amount of information to our proteges through memes. These may not even be the descendants of our…