Notes from “What the dog saw and other adventures” (Malcolm Gladwell) \ stacker news ~BooksAndArticles

I’m gonna renovate my house, and it seems silly to pay for storage space to keep books that I would be unlikely to read again. But my emotional attachment also makes it hard for me to just recycle the book. Thankfully, I highlighted the things that caught my eye the first time I read this book. So, I resolutely spent pockets of time here and there typing all these insights on my phone. To be transferred to Obsidian.

What the dog saw and other adventures (Malcolm Gladwell)

The pitchman must be able to execute “the turn” - the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman.
If, out of a crowd of 50, 25 people come forward to buy, the true pitchman sells to only 20 of them. To the remaining 5, he starts his pitch again, with slight variations. They become the inner core of the next crowd, hemmed in by the people around them.
You have to explain the invention to customers - not once or twice but 3 or 4 times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works, and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you use the device, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.
The plural nature of perfection. For example, the perfect tomato sauce comes in three broad groups: plain, spicy and extra-chunky. Always look for the sources of human variability and apply sensory segmentation.
Ketchup can deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.
Dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning
You could use the techniques of healing to figure out the secrets of selling
The products and commercial messages with which we surround ourselves are as much a part of the psychological furniture of our lives as the relationships and emotions and experiences that are normally the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry.
If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
Movement experts use Laban Movement Analysis to make sense of movement, describing, for instance, how people shift their weight, or how fluid and symmetrical they are when they move, or what kind of effort it involves?
Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions - who understand that emphasis requires them to be bound and explosive.
Presence is not just versatile; it’s also reactive.
There is a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles happen when we don’t have enough information, when someone withholds information. Mysteries are murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered.
A puzzle grows simpler with the addition of each new piece of information.
Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution; it has a power-law distribution.
Power-law homeless policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision of the caseworkers of the YMCA.
Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. But we cannot do both.
But there is no denying the basic lesson of the Canadian trials: that a skilled pair of fingertips can find out an extraordinary amount about the health of a breast, and that we should not automatically value what we see in a picture over what we learn from our other senses.
Gene-signature research.
This balance between the protecting and the limiting of intellectual property is enshrined in the Constitution: “Congress shall have the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative.
the ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Their intentions didn’t form a pattern; they formed a Rorschach blot.
Creeping determinism is the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable. It turns unexpected events into expected ones. The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered. In our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems of the past, we end up creating new problems for the future.
Explicit learning vs implicit learning (learning that takes place outside of awareness). These 2 learning systems are quite separate, based in different part of the brain.
When you are first taught something, you think it through in a very deliberate, mechanical manner. But as you get better, the implicit system takes over.
People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short-term memory, they still have some residue of experience to draw on.
Panic is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much whereas panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct; panic is reversion of instinct.
Choking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the situation in which the performance occurs. Sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience.
A normal accident is the kind of accident one can expect in the normal functioning of a technologically complex operation.
Risk homeostasis. Under certain circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an organisation safer in fact don’t. Because human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.
We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.
Creativity can be divided into two types: conceptual and experimental
These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it.
The kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.
If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.
Apparently, human beings don’t need to know someone in order to believe that they know someone.
Hunan beings have a particular kind of prerational ability for making searching judgements about others.
In the structured interviews, the format is fairly rigid. Each applicant is treated in precisely the same manner. The questions are scripted. The interviewers are carefully trained, and each applicant is rated on a series of predetermined scales.
Use the map to establish impact zones.
It doesn’t work to generalise about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable - or when the act of generalising may itself change the basis of the generalisation.
It would have required a more exacting set of generalisations to be more exactingly applied. It’s always easier just to ban the breed of aggressive dogs.