Not having enough information is a problem. George Akerloff was the first to detail this. In his Nobel-winning paper, The Market for Lemons, he observed that markets with asymmetric information would eventually collapse. Because only sellers would know the condition of the goods they sold, they could always mask defective products — lemons — as quality products and charge […]
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It pays to be a winner. In a winner takes all world, second best doesn’t count for much. This is what we know as the superstar effect: being the best allows you to reap disproportionately larger rewards than your peers who are only slightly less talented.
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Before he became a successful epigrammatist, Marcus Valerius Martialis spent most of his early life serving the rich and wealthy. Martialis would perform a variety of tasks for his patron; he would travel with them everywhere they went, clearing their path and communicating their messages. He was an anteambulo — a person who cleared the path […]
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When Zeno of Cyprus was shipwrecked and stranded on Athens, he wasn’t expecting any good to happen. Having lost everything and with not much else to do, Zeno wandered into a bookshop and was quickly absorbed by the teachings of Socrates. After studying with the great philosophers of his time, he decided to impart his […]
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Seeing patterns everywhere? You’re not alone.
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A false path is something that we are attracted to for the wrong reasons such as fame, fortune, and attention. Our work suffers when that happens.
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The Book In A Single Sentence Knowledge works in very different and counter-intuitvie ways; perhaps having knowledge isn’t personally very important at all. Personal Thoughts The Knowledge Illusion is a great primer on how knowledge works. Why do we need knowledge? How do we think? What do we get wrong? These are topics that the book […]
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