openpolitics.com

Say you had the choice between two surgeons of similar rank in the same department in some hospital. The first is highly refined in appearance; he wears silver-rimmed glasses, has a thin built, delicate hands, a measured speech, and elegant gestures. His hair is silver and well combed. He is the person you would put in a movie if you needed to impersonate a surgeon. His office prominently boasts an Ivy League diploma, both for his undergraduate and medical schools.

The second one looks like a butcher; he is overweight, with large hands, uncouth speech and an unkempt appearance. His shirt is dangling from the back. No known tailor in the East Coast of the U.S. is capable of making his shirt button at the neck. He speaks unapologetically with a strong New Yawk accent, as if he wasn’t aware of it. He even has a gold tooth showing when he opens his mouth. The absence of diploma on the wall hints at the lack of pride in his education: he perhaps went to some local college. In a movie, you would expect him to impersonate a retired bodyguard for a junior congressman, or a third-generation cook in a New Jersey cafeteria.

Now if I had to pick, I would overcome my suckerproneness and take the butcher any minute.

.. having had some success in spite of not looking the part is potent, even crucial, information.

.. An expert rule is in my business never hire a well-dressed trader.

.. a business plan is a useful narrative for those who want to convince a sucker. It works because firms in the entrepreneurship business make most of their money packaging companies and selling them; it is not easy to sell without some strong narrative. But for a real business, something that should survive on its own, rather than a fund-raising scheme, business plans and funding work backwards.

.. When he entered Gordium, he found an old wagon, its yoke tied with a multitude of knots, all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to figure out how they were fastened. An oracle had declared that he who would untie the knot would rule all of what was then called “Asia”, that is Asia minor, the Levant, and the Middle East.

After wrestling with the knot, the Megalos drew back from the lump of gnarled ropes, then made a proclamation that it didn’t matter for the prophecy how the tangle was to be unraveled. He then drew his sword and, with a single stroke, cut the knot in half.

No “successful” academic would ever follow such policy.

.. Richard Dawkins (…) argues that “He behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on”.

(…) Instead, experiments have shown that players rely on several heuristics. The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant .

This error by the science entertainer Richard Dawkins error generalizes to, simply, overintellectualizing humans in their responses to all manner of natural phenomena

.. Likewise religious “beliefs” are simply mental heuristics that solve a collection of problems –without the agent really knowing how –and lead to human activity

.. consider that close to eighty or eighty five percent of the cost of a tomato will be attributed to transportation, storage, waste (from the rotting of unsold inventories), rather than the cost at the farmer level.

..

Now the mere fact than an evaluation causes you to be judged, not by the end results, but by some intermediary metric that invites you to look sophisticated, bring that distortion.