*Should you at least offer an interview to someone with a rotten degree who was, say, the reigning under-25 UK backgammon champion? The ‘fairness police’ would say no, but personally I would see them every time.
*One is a former mixologist and another a poet.
*Likewise, an attempt a few years earlier to find a perfect female form by averaging female body-types similarly foundered.
*In medicine it used to be said – only partly in jest – that the opposite rule applied: that those students with second-class degrees went on to become the best doctors, and people with third-class degrees went on to become the richest doctors.
*I recently met someone who had a lower second-class degree in Mathematics from Cambridge who found it difficult to get a job interview. How can this be? What a nonsense!
*I sometimes wonder whether homeless shelters sometimes secretly wish all those aspiring Ivy League and Oxbridge applicants would just piss off home.
*And still is, though to a lesser extent.
*Try going to your next job interview and performing magnificently in every way, but insisting on wearing a hat throughout. I’m willing to bet that you won’t get the job. Unless, of course, you can persuade another candidate to do the same.
*Also known as the asymmetric dominance effect.
*The two problems were quite possibly connected – the sparks and flames came from lumps of wholemeal bread that had become trapped inside.
*The latter is now better known as Downton Abbey.
*As well as a free bread slicer left behind by the previous occupants.
*Including Buckingham Palace.
*American readers of this book might like to visit the website Wright On The Market, which lists the current Frank Lloyd Wright properties for sale.
*The apartment on the floor below would cost £200,000 more than ours, largely for this reason.
*Such as property, beaches or spouses.
*A discovery which won him a Nobel Prize.
*For more on this, see Paul Feyerabend’s masterpiece Against Method (1975), or the writings of Sir Peter Medawar.
*And one with a highly unusual phobia; Steve Jobs had koumpounophobia, or a fear of buttons. See Chapter 4.2.
*When IBM created a PC division, it placed it in Florida, a whole seaboard’s length away from their head office in New York. It did this to prevent managerialists from stifling new ideas at birth, and to provide experimental space for what T.J. Watson called ‘wild ducks’.
*The process will take months of (and off) your life.
*Well, mostly yes.
*Though it is also possible that your real route and the optimal route did not intersect at all.
*In having various gods and goddesses of fortune – Ganesha, Tyche, Fortuna, etc. – ancient religions were perhaps more objective than modern rationalists, since they were not inclined to attribute all outcomes to individual human rational agency.
*For instance, it does not think, hey, let’s add a feature to the brain, so a million years later we can have an Apollo Program.
*First advanced by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, and described in full in The Enigma of Reason (2017).
*For instance, we can be immune to sound arguments when they clash with an emotional predisposition, or when we don’t like or trust the person making them.
*i.e. stupid.
*I once tallied up what I spend each month on broadband, landline, mobile phones and pay TV, and my wife had to talk me down from a ledge.
*It was the same economic orthodoxy that prompted financial analysts to encourage Apple to launch the ill-fated iPhone 5c, a plasticky variant of the classic iPhone. The argument was that, without a low-cost model, Apple would fail to capture adequate market share. The product failed; anyone who couldn’t afford a new iPhone had already solved the problem by buying or inheriting an older iPhone, not by using a manifestly inferior version.
*I am equally confident that the shop would be terrible.
*She was presumably alive at the time.
*A weirder alternative would be to devalue the coin on the left by lending it to Jeffrey Dahmer or Fred West. Most people wouldn’t want it then – although it would probably find a buyer on eBay.
*This may come as a surprise to American readers, but the use of trains in the UK has been growing for some years – indeed, more Britons travelled by train in recent years than at any time since the 1920s.
*I’ll have long retired by the time it comes into effect.
*Similarly, the best way to improve air travel probably lies with faster airports, not faster aircraft.
*Notable examples include champagne and burgundy.
*Modern printer ink, ounce for ounce, is more expensive than gold.
*Rather like Cheddar cheese in seventeenth-century England, or swan meat in modern Britain.
*I have heard rumours that various hip-hop clothing brands have deployed a similar strategy to Frederick; by making it relatively easy for their clothes to be shoplifted, the stolen clothes ended up being worn by people who were significantly cooler than the people who paid full price. Similarly, some breweries certainly design beer glasses in the hope that they are pilfered. As one client told me, ‘They are getting a free glass costing, perhaps 30p; we’re getting a free advertisement in their kitchen.’
*People who really hate fish should consider skipping the next few pages.
*The importance of naming also extends to universities. A May/June 1999 article, ‘Overrated & Underrated’ by John Steele Gordon, in American Heritage magazine rated Elihu Yale the ‘most overrated philanthropist’ in American history, arguing that the college that became Yale University was successful largely because of the generosity of a man named Jeremiah Dummer. For some reason, the trustees of the school did not want it known by the name ‘Dummer College’.
*The Latin name is sardina pilchard.
*And, perhaps even worse, of cat food. Pilchards were a common cat-food flavour in Britain: it does little to endow a food with the allure of scarcity when it is given to pets. Interestingly, many foods which have the allure of luxury today were treated as more or less disposable at times and in places where they were abundant: domestic staff in Scotland in the nineteenth century were known to demand that it was written into their contract that ‘they not be fed salmon more than three times a week’.
*For international readers, Cornwall is a rural and beautiful county in the far south-west of England, with strong foodie associations.
*A gelateria can charge more than an ice-cream parlour.
*The word comes from the Latin ‘anima advertere’, or ‘to direct attention’.
*Japan is an exception to this rule. In Japan, not only do upmarket restaurants display high-quality photographs of the food, but there is a skilled area of craftsmanship where highly paid people make models of sushi and other foods to display in restaurant windows. I would not recommend this approach to a restaurant in London, Paris or New York.
*Words like ‘creative’ and ‘problem solving’ just sounded less nerdy.
*Note this crafty use of colours.
*Technically a ‘backronym’, since the name Bob preceded the longer form version.
*In Britain, much-despised student loans would be perceived very differently if they were simply reframed as ‘the graduate tax’.
*Will this action alone be enough to kill off the lionfish? Probably not. However, it isn’t necessary to eradicate the lionfish entirely to solve the problem – you simply need to keep its numbers below a certain threshold. A study released by Oregon State University found that in reefs where numbers were kept below ‘threshold density’ native fish populations increased by between 50 and 70 per cent, while in regions where there had been no effort to fight the invasive species, local fish continued to disappear.
*One New York hotel (The W, in Times Square, I think) has a sign pointing to the elevators that uses the British term ‘Lifts’ as a fancy point of difference. Of course, if you are
British yourself this doesn’t really work – I suppose it is equivalent to British property advertisements now using ‘apartment’ rather than ‘flat’, in signalling cosmopolitanism.
*Why is marble considered a sensible flooring material for hotel bathrooms? I suspect the answer here is again, ‘because of what it signals’: marble is a scarce material, and thus expensive; it therefore conveys the idea that the hotel has spared no expense. It is a pity, however, that this display comes at the expense of your safety. If hoteliers must install needlessly posh bathrooms, they should at least use a costly non-slip material. No one seems to compile much data on accidents in hotel bathroom: I know, however, of four colleagues who have been hospitalised from such falls, some of them even while sober.
*Or when Hollywood awards Oscars to mumbling actors.
*With compliments to Adam Morgan, author of Eating the Big Fish and Beautiful Constraint.
*The doyen of this school of thinking is Don Norman, author of the apparently brilliant book The Design of Everyday Things. I say apparently, because my paperback edition is printed in a ludicrously small type, and I cannot read more than a few pages at a time. Not Don’s choice, I suspect.
*The declarative pointing gesture is uniquely human, although domestic dogs seem to have evolved an innate understanding of human finger-pointing. From an early age, they will look in the direction of the extended human finger: a few hundred thousand years before Steve Jobs, dogs had evolved their own version of a graphical user-interface – point-and-whistle, rather than point-and-click.
*For instance, hanging upside down from your toes.
*Starbucks owes a large part of its revenues to hiring out horizontal surfaces (tables) to laptop users under the guise of selling coffee.
*An extreme example of this is often found in car-park design, where up and down ramps are placed at 90 degrees to the direction of travel of your car, to minimise the amount of concrete needed, even though this requires people repeatedly to execute a difficult manoeuvre with a high chance of damage to their vehicle. By contrast, if you want to see the work of the Steve Jobs of car park design, visit Bloomsbury Square in London, where the underground car park is a double-helix shape; it is possible to go all the way to the bottom and back up again with your steering wheel in one position.
*Strictly speaking these radios were not pocket-sized, but in an early manifestation of his genius, Morita ordered shirts with outsized pockets for his employees. If you can’t make the radio smaller, make the pocket larger.
*I can also remember seeing my first jogger in the 1970s – I assumed for a moment that he was being pursued by some unseen assailant.
*Or perhaps it was Morita’s own idea – accounts differ.
*The innards of the Walkman were in part derived from the Sony Pressman, a miniature dictation machine much used by journalists.
*The first Walkman did in any case contain a microphone – but this was to allow a companion to talk to you while you were wearing headphones.
*Although credit for the idea for the Sony Walkman (and a $10m payment) was eventually ceded by Sony to Andreas Pavel, who had earlier patented a ‘stereobelt’ while living in Brazil, I am fairly confident that Morita or Ibuka should be credited with the important idea of removing recording functionality from the device.
*In the same way, the first iPhone was largely comprehensible because people were already familiar with the iPod.
*You may well own a Swiss Army knife but, if you do, I would guess you have only used it when nothing else is to hand.
*Whether this story is true or not, there is something slightly German about the notion that every tradesman should have a qualification.
*Americans should remember that there is no numbered grid system in London – every street is individually named and, to add further confusion, the same street name may reappear in different parts of the city.
*The London system is not perfect: one taxi driver, John Worboys, was convicted in 2009 for 12 rapes and sexual assaults – and was suspected of committing many more, but such cases are very rare indeed. In London in 2016, 31 licensed taxi drivers were charged with sexual offences, and not a single black cab driver was among them.
*The Ultimatum Game and Prisoner’s Dilemma are both theoretical exercises that investigate how cooperation can be made to work. Google them, by all means, but remember they are artificial.
*There is only one instance where anyone I’ve met engaged in a one-shot, high-value exchange with someone whose identity they did not know and, predictably, it was a disaster. A friend had moved from England to Australia and wished to buy a second-hand car. The man selling the car asked to meet him in a supermarket car park. As my friend explained, ‘This seemed weird, but I was newly arrived in Australia and just assumed that that was the way things were done here.’ He foolishly completed the transaction, and the car turned out to be stolen.
*If the shop mainly serves tourists, all bets are off – at least until the advent of TripAdvisor, you could safely con tourists with impunity.
*This may be why companies are so eager to hire graduates. Someone who has invested money and time in the quest for a good job is unlikely to void their entire investment by wandering around your office, stealing laptops.
*I think quite a few people do nick things on their last day at work – although they often refer to these items as ‘souvenirs’. Nicking things on your first day at work is a much riskier enterprise.
*And they do. Fish, it seems, exhibit surprising brand loyalty towards individual cleaner fish.
*It is widely known in the training community that the biggest gain from a company’s investment in training comes in the form of staff loyalty.
*This was the 1990s.
*On one occasion, an advertiser used the principle of costly signalling to run a television advertisement with a target audience of only two or three hundred people. The people in question were chief executives of the British subsidiaries of large American multinationals. Almost all of them at the time were Americans, so in the late 1980s this company ran an advertisement promoting itself during the British transmission of the Super Bowl on Channel 4, at a time when American football was almost unknown in the UK, which meant that airtime was extraordinarily cheap. For these Americans, of course, it would be the one programme on UK TV they were sure to watch in the course of the year. For the Americans, it was ‘a Super Bowl ad’. For us Brits it was just some welcome ad-break filler in the midst of an obscure and incomprehensible sport.
*Sorry, but you are. With the second invitation, there’s the nervous suspicion that there might be a cash bar – I mean if they can’t pay for a stamp, they’re unlikely to splash out on an exciting range of boutique gins, are they?
*Young children develop conservative food tastes around the age at which they learn to crawl, which prevents them from experimenting riskily with their diet.
*Nicholas Gruen, an economist friend of mine, recently visited Barcelona and on seeing Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia remarked, ‘God, if it hadn’t been for modernism, the whole of the twentieth century could have looked like this!’
*Modernism isn’t particularly efficient as an architectural style, by the way. Arches are better than beams for supporting a load, and flat roofs are awful in engineering terms. But modernist architecture, like economics and management consultancy, is good at creating the appearance of efficiency.
*After the age of four, you can’t just scribble on a piece of paper.
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