The Mental Pivot Newsletter: No.14
In this issue: Tuna and the opposite, Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics, and a medley of curated links.
The television sitcom Seinfeld reigned supreme in the American pop culture pantheon of the 1990s. Its present-day stature appears diminished. My teenage kids are familiar with the sitcom Friends—perhaps owing to its enduring popularity on video streaming services—but have no clue about Seinfeld. It’s a shame. Seinfeld explored the human condition through a rare combination of wit, wisdom, and the mundane.
I recently rewatched a clip in which the neurotic George Costanza decides that every decision he’s ever made in life has been a failure and that the only recourse going forward is to ignore his instincts and “do the opposite.” His friend Jerry encourages this, noting that “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”
George’s first act of self-defiance is to forego his usual meal at the local diner. Instead of ordering tuna on toast with a cup of coffee, George opts for the “opposite”: chicken salad on untoasted rye with a cup of tea. Take that, universe!
Here’s the video clip on YouTube for those who don’t remember or are unfamiliar with the show.
The scene is enduring; it stills makes me laugh, but it also makes me pause and think. What are the gut instincts that I blindly and regularly follow? What small action can I adopt to upend my personal status quo? How can I flip my perspective to arrive at a desired outcome but via a different process?
Countless people—far more clever and creative than I—have struggled with these questions. Consider the range of loosely related but distinct strategies for “flipping” your thinking to arrive at a better answer (or sometimes a better question): inversion, counterfactuals, and the devil’s advocate (to say nothing of modern dialectics). Asking questions with these thinking tools in tow opens up a world of possibilities.
For today, however, it’s enough to trade a cup of Earl Grey for my usual cup of coffee and offer a toast to George Costanza and his nifty heuristic (I’ll be sure to let you know if anything comes of it).
Note: In 2019, Netflix paid big bucks for the digital rights to Seinfeld. They plan to make the show available for digital streaming in 2021. We’ll have to wait and see if the show enjoys a cultural renaissance when that happens.
Now onto the updates...
This Week’s Pick:
Who do we [Americans] spend time with across our lifetime? Using data from the American Time Use Survey and US Census, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina’s short article offers insight into two intriguing charts that illustrate the changing patterns of social connections as we age.
What’s New on the Blog:
1. Book Notes: “Naked Statistics” by Charles Wheelan
If you think statistics are boring, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan (2013) might disabuse your belief (I wish he had taught my college statistics course). Wheelan takes a potentially dry topic and—through a combination of relevant examples and a breezy but incisive writing style—demonstrates the power, utility, and even the fun behind statistical analysis. Although Naked Statistics is no replacement for a rigorous textbook, the reader will gain a fundamental understanding of important statistical concepts and techniques—descriptive statistics, sampling, distribution, correlation, probability, the central limit theory, inference, and regression analysis are all covered.
If you’re looking for more books in this vein (i.e. non-technical books that explain important mathematical concepts in an accessible way), Numsense: Data Science for the Layman is another decent read.
What I’m reading next: Wheelan left me wanting more on the subject of risk, uncertainty, and probability, so I picked up a copy of Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness.”
2. Articles and Podcasts of Note (Week of 12/07/2020)
This is my weekly roundup of interesting links and internet finds. You can read the complete post on the blog. Here are the highlights:
Articles:
The Difference between Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Efficiency: The tl;dr: getting things done, doing the right things, and doing things right.
The Erosion of Deep Literacy: In the same vein as Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) and Nicholas Carr (The Shallows). “Technology is changing what, how, and why we read, and in turn what, how, and why we write and even think.”
The Games People Play with Cash Flow: Cedric Chin’s rambling but enlightening post that examines cable television titan John Malone’s strategy at TCI in the 1970s and 1980s. There’s a meta-topic on first principles thinking bookending the article too.
If You Want to Be a [Noun], You Have to Do the [Verb]: “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” Amen to no-nonsense advice.
The Morality of Canceling Student Debt: An ethicist who studies the morality of debt considers the pros and cons of student debt forgiveness.
Note-Taking Methods: Al Khan’s 2019 survey of 11 different note-taking strategies and their pros and cons.
The Social Lives of Forests: Fascinating look at mycorrhizas, underground networks of fungi and tree roots that allow plants of different species to exchange nutrients with each other and even communicate with each other.
Podcasts:
American Coyote: New series that follows the real-life exploits of Elden Kidd, a smuggler who led over 1000 migrants from Mexico to the United States between 1987 and 2001.
Impact Theory—Seth Godin: Prolific author Seth Godin (Purple Cow and The Practice) discusses the importance of process over outcome.
The Irrational Truths Behind User Behavior with Dan Ariely: Product design as seen through the eyes of one of the world’s leading behavioral economists. A master class in flipping your thinking.
Odds & Ends:
Paul Ford’s humorous conversation between the year 2020 and the year 2000.
For those unfamiliar with the work of Paul Ford, I have to recommend his fine long-form piece from 2015 What is Code? (it runs nearly 40,000 words—the length of a short book!). It’s an excellent primer on the ins-and-outs of computer programming for the lay person. If you’re a developer, it’s still a great read as it will attune you ways of communicating technical ideas effectively.
Speaking of long reads, the long-form curation site Longreads released their Best of 2020 list—always a great source for reading ideas.
For those who celebrate Christmas or are interested in markets, The Hustle’s recent piece titled The Economics of Christmas Trees is a fun read.
James Bond fans can watch the pre-Daniel Craig films for free and for a limited time (albeit with commercials) on YouTube. Just hop over to YouTube Movies and look for the James Bond category.
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