Wednesday, December 15th, 2010
I got the following email today, sent from myself exactly 12 years
ago. A University of Michigan alum was looking for people to join
his new startup. I was a little bit tempted by it, but instead
just forwarded it to my future self in
anticipation of the "prototype" he was pitching...
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Tags: bubble,
fallacies,
google,
hindsight bias,
investment,
prediction
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3 Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
"Men are from Mars, women are from Venus," proclaimed John Gray in
his influential, yet controversial, 1992
book
of the same title, which highlights differences between the sexes.
This summer Irmak Sirer, Jake Hofman
and I
explored an
online version of this issue, examining the extent to which
the... »
Tags: diversity,
prediction,
prosecutor's fallacy, web browsing
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10 Comments »
Monday, November 15th, 2010
UPDATE: A revised version of this article now appears at
blog.beeminder.com/akrasia. Preface: I love
dog food, metaphorically speaking, of course. This article is about
forcing oneself to do what one wants to do and I, among other
things, want a new Messy Matters article to go out no less often
than the... »
Tags: beeminder,
behavioral economics,
breakdown of will,
commitment devices,
dynamic inconsistency, economics,
ego depletion,
egonomics,
fallacies,
hyperbolic discounting, multiple selves,
picoeconomics,
precommitment,
preference reversals,
productivity porn,
psychology,
rationality,
self-binding,
time inconsistency,
wagers,
willpower
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330 Comments »
Friday, October 1st, 2010
When the avant-garde jazz group
The Bad Plus
first
covered
Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit” almost ten years ago, they inspired heated controversy for
their supposedly non-traditional approach to jazz. But when John
Coltrane first recorded his now classic 1960 performance of the
show tune “My... »
Tags: data,
jazz,
music,
opera
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7 Comments »
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
(Cross posted at
Decision Science News.) Do you know
what the #$*! your social media strategy is? Perhaps it's "to facilitate audience conversations and drive
engagement with social currency"? Or maybe "to amplify word of
mouth by motivating influencers"? Well, given all the lies and
damned lies being told about social, fellow...
»
Tags: homophily,
influence,
social networks
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7 Comments »