Mental Pivot #68: Expectations, Pricing, Socrates
The superpower of low expectations, a guide to the psychology of pricing, and an instructive demonstration of the Socratic method.
Welcome new subscribers and returning readers. I hope you enjoy this week's recommendations…
Thinking Tools:
Low Expectations: “When people say, ‘higher risk equals higher return’ they should actually be saying, ‘higher risk means I’ll probably earn lower returns most of the time, but there’s a small chance I’ll earn very good returns that make up for it.’”
My Lizard Brain Is No Match for Infinite Scroll: “I’m declaring defeat. Infinite scroll has won.” I feel the author’s pain and resignation.
Pricing Psychology: Nick Kolenda’s comprehensive guide to pricing techniques is helpful both for marketers and for consumers. For each technique, Kolenda offers a rationale for why the tactic works, along with research citations from academic journals.
The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Questions instead of by Telling: Rick Garlikov shares a transcript from a teaching experiment with a 3rd grade class in which he demonstrates the power of the Socratic method by teaching the children about binary numbers and binary arithmetic only by asking questions. It’s an instructive reminder of the power of Socratic investigation and the joy of active learning.
Why Facts Don’t Change our Minds: Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article from 2017 remains relevant five years on. Citing key research, she reminds us about our inability to revise our beliefs, tendency to overgeneralize from limited information, and susceptibility to confirmation bias.
Reading Enrichment:
The Age of Houseplants: Anne Helen Peterson kicks off a two part series on the history of the houseplant—a subject more interesting than you might think. “Houseplants occupy a curious intersection of home and design and history…they’re also artifacts of colonization and the controlling impulses that accompanied it, and quiet, nostalgic attempts to regain a steadily dissipating relationship with the natural world.”
The Curse of Sliced Bread: Mary Harrington draws parallels between homemade bread and the convenience of store-bought bread with the overarching drive to optimize time and productivity. It’s a drive for time-savings whose costs ought to be more carefully considered.
The Life Cycle of Outrage: Mark Manson’s analysis of a pervasive phenomenon. “If anything is true in the social media age, it’s that narratives will evolve in order to saturate as much attention as they can. This means that any take will eventually be taken to its extreme.”
Voice Lessons: How Coaches Get in Athletes’ Heads: Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist at Stanford. She shares her findings from interviewing dozens of athletes and how they overcome fear, doubt, and the pressure to perform. Her finding: “athletes use their coaches’ voices to replace their own intentions and anxieties.”
War 101: A former combat leader in the U.S. Marine Corps, shares a helpful primer on the principles of modern warfare vis a vis the war in Ukraine (the lessons are based on the USMC’s seminal “Warfighting” manual from 1989). It’s a fascinating 3-part series that covers a wide range of ideas like maintaining the moral high ground, centers of gravity, critical vulnerabilities, the rule of threes, main and supporting efforts, intent and decentralization, OODA loops, the five B’s of logistics, and the safety-force-mobility algorithm.
Odds & Ends:
Detect Fakes is a project from the MIT Media Lab that tests if participants can distinguish between authentic content and fabricated ones. The website presents a sequence of media snippets (transcripts, audio, and videos) and users are asked to provide a confidence score about the content’s authenticity. The supplemental article, How to Counteract Misinformation Created by AI, is also worth reading. Try it out and let me know how you did.
Hive Systems Password Table is a sobering look at the relative strength of different types of passwords. As you can see from the table, short passwords are susceptible to instantaneous brute force attacks. The full article that follows shares helpful insights on password cracking techniques, hashing, and hardware benchmarks. Maybe it’s time to audit your personal passwords?
Ukrainian photographer Juri Nesterov was profiled in a recent article, Street Photography Documents Ukrainian Life Across Decades. It’s a fascinating record of life in that country from the 1980s to the present. Many of Nesterov’s prints were destroyed years ago, but some of his photographs are preserved on Flickr.
Newsletter Shout-Outs:
10+1 Things is a weekly curated newsletter by engineer and autodidact, Rishikesh Sreehari. Favored topics include technology, business, sustainability, personal development and art (in other words, it’s perfect for Mental Pivot readers).
Refind is a content discovery tool that sends curated articles to your email inbox or via mobile app (iOS and Android). Focus your attention on what’s really relevant to you.
The Sample: A newsletter discovery tool. Based on your interests and feedback, The Sample sends a new newsletter recommendation to your inbox on a daily or weekly basis.
Thank you for subscribing to the Mental Pivot Newsletter. If you’re enjoying it, be sure to share it with your friends and spread the word.
I want to be able to deliver a top-notch newsletter to all of you. To that end, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s working, what doesn’t, and things you’d like to see more of. You can reach me by replying directly to this email or by adding a comment on Substack.
If this newsletter was forwarded to you, visit this link to subscribe.
Thanks a lot for the feature!