Thought of the Day from Albert Einstein
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
I read for lots of reasons, of course. For entertainment. For information. For intellectual stimulation. To fill up a rainy day, since I can’t play piano for eight hours at a time. But another reason to read is to make me a better writer. In a wonderful essay in the Atlantic monthly, Richard Bausch makes…
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
Early in his book The Power Makers, Maury Klein does a fantastic job of explaining the importance that modern energy systems, like steam and electricity, played in human history: All the achievements of humanity down to about the eighteenth century were constrained by the inability to find more efficient ways to do things beyond the…
In case the Internet had any remaining credibility, as a source of truthful information, the MBA channel now lists me as a B School legend: The U.S. based website Poets & Quants has published a different kind of ranking. They haven’t chosen the best b-schools, but instead paid tribute to some of the best b-school…
Interesting take on the Bay of Pigs thinking in the Kennedy administration, as summarized in Jim Newton’s book on the Eisenhower Presidency: “The entire enterprise depended on an intelligence assumption that proved false, namely, that the Cuban people would greet the invasion force as liberators and turn against Castro.” Sounds eerily familiar to the Bush…
In World War II, soldiers were reminded regularly to take their anti-malaria pills. One soldier summarized this practice as follows: “Like fat cattle who are pampered to the very doors of the slaughterhouse, it was important that if and when we died we should be in good health.” Gulp. (Click here to view comments)