What is, not What Should Be - Unhappiness/Happiness

Where is this anger coming from? What his all this general unease, unhappiness?

I need to start seeing things as they ARE, not as they should be or the way I want them to be. Accept things as they are, change the things I can, and leave all the rest.

There are going to be jerks, people who have no class or manners. Not much I can do about that. What if they are my own kids? I didn't raise them like that!

Are they really Zen masters? Teaching me? Challenging me?

Roy Dean says, "Discover who you are." Who am I? Who am I?

If I'm not chasing the money, what am I chasing?

Notes: Think Like a Freak

by S. Levitt & S. Dubner

What it means to think like a freak

• First two books (Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics) were animated by simple set of ideas: 1. Incentives are cornerstone of modern life; 2. Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so; 3. Conventional wisdom is often wrong; 4. Correlation does not equal causality.
• Economic approach relies on data. 
• When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently ... ie. free healthcare. 

Three hardest words

• I don't know.
• Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. 
• When it comes to solving problems, start by putting away your moral compass. 
• Key to learning is feedback. 
• Good way to get feedback is run a field experiment. Take the lab mind-set into real world. Still running an experiment but the subjects don't necessarily know, which means feedback is pure. 

What's Your Problem?

• Evidence suggests teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether parents have instilled an appetite for education. If these home-based inputs are lacking, not much a school can do. 
• Rather than what's wrong with our schools, ask "Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?" When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places. When we talk about why American kids aren't doing so well, we should be talking less about schools and more about parents. 
• Important to properly define the problem or redefine the problem.
• Kobayashi -- isolation was really one long bout of experimentation and feedback. 
• Koba redefined the problem he was trying to solve. Competitors were asking, "How do I eat more hot dogs?" He was asking, "How do I make hot dogs easier to eat?" Only by redefining the problem was he able to  discover a new set of solutions. 
• Limits that we accept, or refuse to. 

Truth is in the Roots

• Need to identify and attack the root cause of problems (not symptoms). 
• Legalization of abortion lead to less crime. 
• Crime - start talking about the benefits of good, loving parents who give their children  a chance to lead a safe and productive lives. 
• Instead of treating the symptoms of ulcer, they uncovered the root cause (bacteria that lived in the stomach). 
• Transfusion of healthy gut bacteria. Fecal transplants. 

Think like a Child

• Think small, not big. 
• Expert performance - raw talent is overrated. Practice endlessly. Is it possible to practice something you don't enjoy? 
• Have fun, think small, don't fear the obvious - all childlike behaviors. 

Giving Candy to a Baby

• People respond to incentives. 
• Herd-mentality incentive very strong.
• Moral incentives don't work well. Wrong-headed strategy -- subtext message is that a lot of people just like you are doing this. It legitimizes the undesirable behavior. 
• Once asked to donate, the social pressure is great. 
• "Once-and-done" strategy very successful. Shifted the relationship between itself and its donors.
• Backfiring bounties/incentives -- "cobra effect:" India -- they began to breed, raise, and slaughter the snakes to get the bounty. Bounty rescinded, then freed the snakes, making problem worse. 
• M. Twain: "Best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Oz, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them." 
• To make incentives work -- treat other people with decency. 

King Solomon and David Lee Roth

• "pooling equilibrium" -- two mothers; "separating equilibrium" -- real mother instinct ... guilty party to unwittingly reveal his guilt through his own behavior. 
• Teach your garden to weed itself. 
• Nigerian scammer -- minimize his false positives, by finding a supremely gullible person.

How to Persuade People

• Appreciate that your opponent's opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on idealogy and herd thinking. 
• Consumer has the only vote that counts. Your argument may be airtight, but if it doesn't resonate for the recipient, you won't get anywhere. 
• Good idea to acknowledge not only the known flaws but the potential for unintended consequences. 
• Acknowledge the strengths of your opponent's argument.
• Keep insults to yourself.
• Tell stories. Not anecdotes. A story  fills out the picture. It uses data to portray a sense of magnitude. Also includes  the passage of time. Stories capture our attention and are therefore good at teaching. 

Upside of Quitting

• Sunk-cost fallacy
• Opportunity cost outweigh the sunk cost, then time to quit or change course.
• Inventions: key is failing fast and failing cheap. 
• Quitting at core of thinking like a Freak... "Letting go."