Alchemy

by Rory Sutherland

  *Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp qualifies as art perhaps through bravery.

  *Sorry, that should be ‘Prose is easier to write than verse; Its persuasive powers are therefore worse.’ Although poetry is assumed to be in decline, I was delighted to read recently that Wayne Rooney writes love poems to his wife, Coleen. It’s hard to convey devotion in an email.

  *Sorry that should be, ‘When you add a tune to something, there is one great consequence: we will somehow give it meaning, even if it makes no sense,’ sung to the tune of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’.

  *Anyone familiar with provincial British tea and coffee shops will know that they follow the most eccentric opening hours in the known universe.

  *Though a neon sign would be better suited to an American diner than a British coffee shop.

  *I know of one branch of John Lewis that could double their sales simply by placing a sign at the entrance to their car park.

  *The dying words of J. Sainsbury, founder of the Sainsbury’s chain: ‘Make sure the stores are kept well-lit’.

  *My use of one local restaurant doubled when I discovered an obscure public car park hidden behind it.

  *I have never worked for McKinsey, Bain or the Boston Consulting Group, so I may be doing them a great disservice, but I think I am safe in saying that you don’t earn much kudos within those technocratic organisations by talking about furniture.

  *As Cole Porter once said.

  *The relationship between flowers and bees is technically called mutualism. I apologise if I mention bees rather a lot in this book, but mutualism is particularly revealing of the mechanisms by which honest cooperation can be instigated and sustained.

  *After all, I’m not driving 50 miles to a restaurant if I can’t be fairly sure that the food is spectacular.

  *By noticeable, I am not just referring to vision. Scent may be more important – and it also seems more difficult for other plants to mimic. But apparently ‘Bees don’t just recognise flowers by their colour and scent; they can also pick up on their minute electric fields,’ a mechanism that was only recently discovered.

  *Which may be why such orchids are rare and tend to flourish only at the beginning of the season, before bees wise up.

  *Just as TripAdvisor and other ratings mechanisms have changed the game here.

  *Or once, in the case of a pension or a funeral plan, for instance.

  *Bees signal nectar and pollen sites to each other by an elaborate dance, where the direction of the dance signals the direction of a site worth visiting.

  *The kingsnake, which is harmless, mimics the coral snake, which is deadly. The rhyme to remember the difference is ‘Red touching black, safe for Jack. Red touching yellow, kill a fellow.’

  *In a just world, Zahavi’s name would be much better known.

  *Ladybirds, for instance, secrete a foul-tasting chemical when eaten, and the brightly coloured dots on their backs advertise their inedibility.

  *Before you ever dismiss someone who uses poor spelling and grammar, remember this paragraph. Wallace, one of the greatest minds in biology, left school at 14. In his famous 1858 paper to the Linnean Society, he said of evolution that ‘The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.’ The cybernetician Gregory Bateson observed in the 1970s that, though he saw it as an analogy, Wallace had ‘probably said the most powerful thing that had been said in the nineteenth century’. In complex systems thinking, he understood the principle of self-regulating systems and feedback.

  *We might even apply the same reasoning to eighteenth-century British redcoats’ red coats: ‘I’m such a badass, I don’t need to hide in the bushes like a Yankee.’

  *The full title was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).

  *At least in my local area.

  *The Russian oligarchy seems to manifest certain features of this rivalrous second kind of tribe.

  *For instance, it is arguably better for mildly sociopathic males to aspire to own a large yacht than to aspire to run the secret police.

  *Goods that increase in demand as their price goes up.

  *You may have noticed that there are very few famous Belgians – this is because when you are a famous Belgian (like Magritte, Simenon or Brel) everyone assumes you are French. In the same way, there are few commonly cited examples of successful sexual selection: when sexual selection succeeds, people casually attribute the success to natural selection.

  *For a good decade or so, cars were inferior to horses as a mode of transport – it was human neophilia and status-seeking, rather than the pursuit of ‘utility’, which gave birth to the Ford Motor Company – Henry was a bit of ‘boy racer’ in his youth.

  *Rather than, like the peacock, senselessly overinvesting in the rear spoiler.

  *Why?

  *Had there been a Samsung, LG or Dyson hoverboard on offer, you very well might have bought one.

  *In truth, had we been French, this wouldn’t have been much of a crisis, but to the British, the idea of eating horse is anathema.

  *In the same way, the psychological solutions I propose in this book concern those social or commercial issues which are more psychological not physical. A famine will not be cured by psychological intervention – but over-eating might be.

  *Painkillers are more effective when the pills are red.

  *His writings on the subject include ‘The Placebo Effect’ in R. L. Gregory (ed.), Oxford Companion to the Mind (2004).

  *If you suggested the NHS invested in more elaborate drugs packaging, they’d have palpitations.

  *Or any other language, come to that.

  *I have a friend who is not only terrified of heights – she is also terrified of tomatoes. I myself, like the late Steve Jobs, suffer from koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons. Mine is a mild case: I am now, as an adult, happy to wear buttons when they are firmly attached to clothing, but find them disquieting when loose. Steve’s phobia was more severe – he would never wear anything with visible buttons. Some theorise that this influenced his design philosophy, driving his refusal to produce a phone until you could produce one without a button-containing keyboard.

  *It would be a bit odd if they did: ‘Just hold on a second, darling, will you? I’m just elevating my testosterone settings and turning my tumescence levels up to eight.’

  *Purist, petrolhead (especially German) friends have always ridiculed me for this. ‘Ja, but you don’t have ze same sense of kontrol,’ they say. This is now rubbish – but, in defence of my Teutonic friends, European automatics were often quite bad 30 years ago.

  *The steam regulator (remember Alfred Russel Wallace, from Chapter 3.9) is, of course, another.

  *British readers, I’m aware that I’m at risk of sounding a bit ‘Swiss Tony’ here.

  *Or by looking at pornography – apparently.

  *In The Righteous Mind (2012).

  *I’m with the aliens here. Does anyone else have to put up with this? It drives me nuts.

  *A similar explanation is sometimes used to explain human obesity – for most of human evolution, a reliable instinct was ‘If you find anything tasty, eat a lot of it.’

  *Many of the unpleasant symptoms of an illness – a high temperature, say – arise not from the illness itself, but from the body’s attempts to fight it.

  *If that means homeopathy, so be it.

  *For those interested in learning more about this theory, there is a very rewarding YouTube video in the ‘enemies of reason’ series in which Nicholas Humphrey argues his case against Richard Dawkins, the high priest of reductionist rationality.

  *Special forces personnel may be exceptions here – they may be selected
for their ability to switch off fear, and some show strong signs of psychopathy. Nevertheless, for the rest of us grunts, whether to be frightened or not isn’t a matter in which we have much choice.

  *And/or a quarter of bottle of whisky.

  *When we buy L’Oréal products, perhaps we are advertising to ourselves ‘that I’m worth it’.

  *Though I might buy one if I got divorced!

  *A film where, to be completely honest, the premise is more interesting than the execution.

  *Occasionally, ads playing to this idea have run. ‘Small penis? Have we got a car for you!’ said one Canadian advert for a Porsche dealership (before I imagine Porsche stripped it of its franchise).

  *If you are not a megalomaniac, do not buy a megayacht. A friend of mine organised the sale of them for many years: he said that the main lesson he learned about yachts is that, above a certain minimum, the pleasure they provide is in inverse proportion to their size. Also, a very large yacht can only be moored in a few harbours, meaning that you will often end up moored next to a yacht even larger than your own.

  *Actually, I did, but that was because I had spent some years being obsessed with the effects of uncertainty on waiting. When I shared my suggestion with other people, they mostly shrugged.

  *Additionally, we also experience credit card transactions as being over 15 per cent cheaper than equivalent cash transactions.

  *I am not proposing the use of placebo buttons in aircraft cockpits – though in fly-by-wire aircraft something similar exists, where the on-board computer interprets the pilot’s intentions rather than obeying his instructions directly.

  *Pizza delivery apps often give you step-by-step updates on the creation, baking, quality control, boxing and delivery of your pizza. How much of this is actually true real-time information, and how much is simply there to give the reassuring impression of progress? I am fairly sceptical, but I kind of like the illusion of progress, nonetheless. What these functions say is, ‘Relax – we haven’t forgotten about you.’

  *In Korea they even tested the obverse idea – of a digital display on green traffic lights to show oncoming drivers the number of seconds left before the light turned red. This, as you will realise with just a moment’s thought, was a very bad idea indeed.

  *I think women are let off rather lightly for this level of extravagance. If men spent two trillion dollars a year on something totally irrational – building model train sets, say – they would be excoriated for it.

  *Note that pornographic films do not need a five-figure clothing budget in order to import in-season catwalk dresses without which men find it impossible to be aroused. And no man ever became aroused at the sight of a £2,000 bag.

  *Thanks to the comedian – and astute evolutionary psychologist – Sara Pascoe for this observation.

  *Men arguably achieve the same effect by the self-administration of four pints of strong lager.

  *Like L’Oréal, the slogan for the Romanée-Conti vineyard, if they were to devise such a vulgar thing, would be ‘Because I’m worth it.’

  *Our current obsession with wine is probably overblown. It now seems mandatory for anyone who fancies themselves to be a connoisseur to pretend to care hugely about tiny details of terroir and climate, which was not always the case. Julia Child was once asked ‘What’s your favourite wine?’ and replied, ‘Gin’.

  *I hope it doesn’t show.

  *North American readers: Night Nurse would be shelved next to NyQuil.

  *More likely, I would simply take double the recommended dose ‘to make sure’.

  *Another important facet of the effect, I suspect, is that it’s important for any consumable product claiming to have medical powers to taste slightly weird. Things you apply to the skin would be more effective if they were to tingle or sting. A friend has told me that, in the production of the tonic wine Sanatogen, the last ingredient to be added in production was a chemical whose sole purpose was to taste slightly foul. Similarly, Diet Coke has to taste slightly more bitter than ordinary Coke, otherwise people will not believe it is a diet drink.

  *You don’t have to take my word for it – I’m just some ad guy. But if you read books such as The Mating Mind (2000) or Spent (2009) by Geoffrey Miller, or The Darwin Economy (2001) or Luxury Fever (2000) by Robert H. Frank (both authors are brilliant eminent evolutionary psychologists) you will see that both come to more or less the same conclusions. Gad Saad is another very good commentator on this phenomenon, especially in The Consuming Instinct.

  *Put another way, if Richard Dawkins thinks it’s a good idea, it isn’t a good placebo.

  *High price, small container, weird taste.

  *The answer to this question in theoretical maths world is 2pm. However, in reality one of the buses was delayed by a puncture, and the other one got stuck in traffic.

  *The ‘second-order’ question which tends to get overlooked in simple optimisation models.

  *This is another reason why many theoretical models of cooperation such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma are so stupid. In the real world we can choose whom we do business with. Would you happily buy a car from a vagrant you met in an alley? Obviously not.

  *You don’t have to believe in God, by the way – you just have to believe that he does.

  *Certainly her talent for spotting a con artist would far exceed her ability to spot a doctored car.

  *I know it is professional suicide to acknowledge Wikipedia, but in a chapter on satisficing it seems strangely appropriate. Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it is really, really good.

  *Modern public companies have a worryingly short lifespan as a result.

  *Exam question: is the shareholder value movement destroying capitalism?

  *It is a useful heuristic to avoid airport hotels, as they have a bit of a captive market. However, there is an exception to every heuristic and the couple, as is typical of them, had chosen what must be the world’s only great restaurant found at an airport hotel. It was magnificent.

  *This discussion was similar to – and almost contemporary with – the work of Daniel Ellsberg in formulating the Ellsberg Paradox.

  *Your decision will also greatly depend on whether you already own a car. Few people, I think it’s fair to say, own a Bugatti Veyron as their everyday runabout. Around 80 per cent of Rolls-Royce owners also own a Mercedes. Remember the story about recruiting people in groups? The greater the number of cars you own, the greater the variance of choice. If someone owns three Corvettes, they really need to buy a small electric car.

  *The net value of the cherries minus the small chance that you’ll never survive to eat them.

  *The plotline to almost every successful work of literature and every interesting film – whether a rom-com or an action movie – involves exceptional, high-adrenaline moments when characters are forced to throw caution to the wind. To create these moments in an age of technology, Hollywood is forced to fall back on rather hackneyed devices – for example, one of the protagonists will hold up a mobile phone and exclaim, ‘Damn, no signal.’ This is to prevent the audience losing patience with the plot by simply thinking, ‘I don’t get it – why don’t you just call the police?’

  *Quite low, by eBay standards.

  *In 2011 one of Britain’s finest restaurants, a three-star Michelin establishment, suffered the worst norovirus outbreak ever experienced by a single restaurant. Rather oddly, this did not seem to imperil its ranking. Presumably so long as the jus and tapenades are all impeccably handmade, the Michelin inspectors do not consider three days spent shitting out your innards as significantly detracting from the dining experience.