hegemonicon

It's worth pointing out that we don't know how much of a success this is without being able to compare it to how much they would have made in the same period of time without the promotion - ie: what were the average weekly sales of the game before this was announced?

This is a huge step forward if true - as far as I know, how a complex molecule like DNA initially evolved has been one of the great unanswered questions in biology for quite some time.

The only reason that things like company loyalty and morale and doing meaningful work seem like life-threatening problems is because ACTUAL life-threatening problems - food, shelter, safety - have largely been solved [1].

So perhaps the solution is to have them spend a few months living in Darfur, and then see if they still complain about their 'stressful' office jobs. In other words, perspective - No matter how crappy your job seems, you're still doing better than approx. 99% of all humans who have ever lived.

[1] - Obviously poverty and hunger still exist even industrialized countries. But probably not for the people complaining about their jobs.

I wonder if it's related to the following phenomena:

An antique seller has a a shop downtown. A second antique shop next door, and his business drops. Then a third antique shop opens across the street, the neighboorhood becomes 'the antique district', and business booms for all three.

I haven't read it, but the anchor effect seems a more specific instance of anchoring bias. Essentially when forming a an opinion/solving a problem, we do it by taking an initial value and then modifying it up or down as we see fit. This initial value is whatever we happen to notice first. So unless we get things exactly right in that first estimation, we get things wrong because we fail to revise our beliefs properly.

The best example of this bias is when people are asked to estimate the value of

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9,

the number they come up with is around ten times lower than when asked to estimate

9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

What has been created here is a new kind of API, one the result of a lifetime of experience, and one that will no doubt influence the way you think about programming for years to come.

How fortunate you all must feel to use this API, and to interact with this amazing, lifechanging software. I don't think I exaggerate when I say that within this API lies the ability to understand our very universe.

Apparently on the US side, the SAC commander would receive a phone call that a nuclear attack was under way, and he would be given 2-3 minutes to decide if the warning was valid (all warnings turned out to be false in hindsight, obviously). I'm not sure I like that system a whole lot better.

Edit: Also see Stanislav Petrov, who correctly identified an attack warning as false: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Years of experience gives you much better information to work with, but you're still using your same old thought processes to...process it. You can offset a lower intelligence with better information, but only to a point.

You have to love a comic that stars Kurt Godel as the villain...

Unlucky people tend to be more focused on whatever they happen to be doing because they're worried about making a mistake. But there's quite a bit of evidence that this sort of conscious, focused thought uses up so many mental resources that it can actually become a hindrance. Professional athletes perform significantly worse when they actively contemplate their behavior, and focusing on something prevents the mindwandering that's necessary for creative, insightful solutions. Your subconscious is a HUGE part of your brain, but focusing too hard on something makes it harder to use it.

The best writing advice I've ever heard can be summed up more or less by the following:

Just do it. Don't worry about creating that perfect sentence or finding that word that perfectly expresses what you're feeling or setting up the perfect introduction. Just start putting the words to paper, even if it's complete gibberish. Don't labor under enormous expectations, don't worry about the end result, don't think about whether it sucks or not, just keep letting one word flow after the other. You can go back and correct the hell out of it later, purge everything except that one perfect paragraph, but before you get there you need to write and write and write. Preferably every day. They say every writer has 1 million bad words in them, and you have to get them all out before you can write anything worthwhile. So just write write write, and worry about the other stuff later.

Relying on 'personal moral codes' without the help of math is a good way to form completely incoherent judgements. I wonder what sort of personal moral code you have that favors the death of five over the death of one. Saying its a 'moral' problem rather than a 'math' problem doesn't explain anything.

You paint a plausible scenario. But the ticket price isn't all going to the theater owner. Most of it goes to the studio (theaters make most of their money off of concessions as I understand it). Since different studios are competing with each other in the same theater, there is definitely room for price reduction.

If that's true, then an overflow movie could gain a great advantage over the other overflow movies by lowering its ticket prices.

Exactly - it costs the same amount whether the theater is full or there is one person in it. Therefore if the theater is empty, they should be charging LESS to get more people inside it, since the marginal cost of each additional viewer is very near zero.

Practice.

Something I've discovered is that the more I let my mind and my mouse wander away from what I'm supposed to be working on (ie: right now), the harder it is to maintain focus. I suspect this has to do with the reward circuitry in my brain - when I desire something (going on the internet, sending a text message, etc) and IMMEDIATELY receive it, I become habituated to that. So much so that when I desire something and don't immediately get it, my dopamine drops, and it becomes extremely important that I get it right away. It works the same way as addiction, really.

So to avoid it, you just need to get used to denying yourself - eventually your reward center will get used to not getting what it wants immediately, and your dopamine will return to normal levels.

Marcus Aurelius - relentless in his quest for self perfection even while ruling one of the most powerful empires in the world.

No suggestions other than I think it's a great idea.

Failure is more than ok - it's essential. There is literally no other way to learn how to do something than trial and error.

What's important to remember is that even though it's important, failure still has a cost - be it in lost money, lost opportunity, lost time, etc. You're trading something away in exchange for knowledge. You need to make sure you maximize the value of that transaction by making your failures as cheap as possible.

If I had to guess I would say that "Super Achievers" are people so excited to work on something that they constantly feel frustrated when they're not getting it done. To fight this, they probably tweak and adjust their habits until they find ones that minimize their frustration. So you'll find some people that swear off todo lists, and some people that swear by them. Some people who plan things out meticulously and some who wait for inspiration to strike and then work till 2:00 am. There's probably a few basic techniques that seem to be universal (though I don't think not using to-do lists is one of them), but the most important is to fiercely want to do something - everything else will stem from that.

Not shown: other 100,000 computer geeks making $0 from their online games.

This is one of the worst things I've read in recent memory. Nerds rising at the expense of artists? Plotting a world where writers and musicians are at the mercy of mathematicians? Even the most cursory examination of this piece shows that it's not connected to anything resembling reality. Since when did creative types run the show? Since when were 'footballers' (athletes) relegated to the sidelines? What fantasy world has this guy been living in?

He makes a good point - sometimes it's that last little bit of skill that makes the difference between a success and a failure. When you completely master something, the whole game can change.

The problem is that it's insanely hard to completely master something - there's the time involved in doing it, but there's ALSO the fact that you're competing with everyone else who's also trying to master it.

The real value of the 80/20 rule, I think, is that it gives you the ability to devote time to several different pursuits, giving you a combination of skills that few other people can match. Call this the 'Scott Adams Rule' of success - you can either be the very best at something, or be in the top 25% of 2 or more things and combine them.

See: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

EURISKO is a development in the last 30 years (though just barely).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko

There's nothing particularly magical about emotion - it's just a low level computation by our subconscious that we don't have conscious access to. Happiness, anger, fear, etc are all responses to the environment we evolved because they produce (or at least, did at one time) useful actions. It's the mechanism the brain used to make predictions based on data before it developed a consciousness.

An AI would make predictions based on data just like a human would, but the mechanism it used to do it would certainly be different.

The problem with AI development seems to be the assumption that it's going to be a useful business tool. This is sort of like assuming that an artificial organism created in the lab will make a good secretary.

Yep. Million dollar ideas are a dime a dozen - really, the idea is the EASY part.

Happiness is different from pleasure. Pleasure is closely related to the reward system in our brains, something specifically designed NOT to provide long-term emotional changes (otherwise we would stop seeking rewards).

This is basic strategy really - being a dick to people will almost never bring you closer to a goal you've set, which means there's no point in doing it. The success rate of "calling people stupid until they agree with me" is quite low...

The study escapes me at the moment (it might be from a Dan Gilbert TED talk), but people who've just spent time on a difficult puzzle/task are also shown to have less willpower. It's not so much that we have a finite amount of willpower that we have a finite amount of cognitive resources that we can devote to various tasks, willpower being one of them.