Alchemy

by Rory Sutherland

  *And, even if he did know, he wouldn’t tell you.

  *Smell almost certainly plays a much greater role in attraction than we are aware of. One experiment suggests we are attracted to the smell of people who have an immune system complementary to our own.

  *An unsubtitled version of Last Year at Marienbad, for example.

  *Notice that, if you don’t understand the scoring system, tennis is actually rather boring to watch.

  *Or if you are drunk.

  *I had never been able to understand the popularity of JFK, and wondered if there was some elusive upside that had escaped me.

  *Being British, I do not generally make hairsplitting distinctions between rebellious former colonies.

  *Though, since he was born in New Jersey, he may have been affected by bias towards his home state.

  *A friend of mine who lives overseas is sadly losing her hearing, though I didn’t realise this at all when we met recently – she had learned to lip read astonishingly well. But what was truly fascinating was that she hadn’t realised that her hearing was failing until late in the process, because she was unconsciously learning to lip read and was hearing sounds which in reality she could only ‘see’.

  *I spent 24 hours in a Qatari prison once; it seemed like a month.

  *Memo to the world’s airlines: ‘More curries please.’ Indian food tastes magnificent at altitude.

  *My own subjective experience, having flown several times on a 787, is that it will pay off. My last trip, to Los Angeles, was the first time I have ever crossed the Atlantic and experienced no ill effects from jet lag at all.

  *This is why some people propose that inheritance tax, or death duties, should be renamed as a ‘windfall tax’ and levied on the recipients, rather than the estate of the deceased.

  *On which I hope you are not reading this book!

  *Technically, magenta.

  *It’s the ‘York’ in ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’ (or the ‘y’ in ‘Roy G. Biv’).

  *If your brain were more objective, rather than showing you purple, it would display a patch of flickering grey with the words ‘system error’ on it.

  *This would be a rare instance of a male primate criticising a female for spending too much on a TV.

  *The three men who invented the blue LED (Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura) received the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics.

  *An advertising friend of mine moved to Majorca. ‘It’s a wonderful location, because on the overnight ferry I can get to France in an hour and to Barcelona in an hour.’ He paused. ‘Well, it’s actually nine hours, but I’m asleep for eight of them.’

  *Just as you can’t translate perceptual purple into purple photons. And you can’t translate ultra-violet photons into human vision.

  *Native American languages are like this.

  *Spanish and Portuguese, say.

  *I have spoken British English all my life, but I am still not sure I could reliably explain the distinction between ‘quite’ meaning ‘very’ and ‘quite’ meaning ‘somewhat’. It’s just one of those things you grow up understanding – like the many advantages of having a proper monarchy and not allowing everyone to own guns, you either get it or you don’t. I once gave a talk in New York where I used the phrase ‘feel like a bit of a twat’. In British English the word ‘twat’ is close in meaning to (though still stronger than) ‘twit’, but In US English using ‘twat’ or ‘twot’ is tantamount to dropping the C-bomb. As a result my talk, which had been filmed, needed to be edited before being sent out. Afterwards, someone came up and told me they thought my talk had been ‘quite good’, which in British English means ‘kind of okay but nothing special’. I was waiting for tips on how to improve it, before I realised that they’d liked it a lot: in American English, ‘quite’ is an intensifier, like ‘very’ or ‘really’. In British English it is occasionally an intensifier (‘quite excellent’), but mostly it is a modifier (‘quite interesting’).

  *Carter’s comments, as read by the interpreter, were often backtranslated as ‘I desire to know the Poles carnally’. This was, if anything, a bit of a euphemism.

  *In the same way that modern-day Amish would probably no longer choose ‘Intercourse’ as the name for a town in Pennsylvania.

  *Even though Poles probably don’t like to acknowledge this.

  *‘Constipado’ in Spanish is a false friend if you speak English or French: it is very easy to translate as ‘constipated’, as one French translator famously did, forgetting that to a Spaniard it means ‘bunged up with a cold’.

  *Perhaps helped by the fact that, in the Netherlands, English-language films are subtitled rather than dubbed.

  *We welcomed the invention of email because it gave us the power to communicate with the world instantaneously and for free, but we forgot to ask what the consequences might be if everyone else on the planet was similarly free to communicate with us.

  *The ethnographer Tricia Wang even suggested in her 2016 TEDxCambridge talk that the quantification bias created by big data led to the near death of Nokia as a handset manufacturer. All their data suggested that people would only spend a certain proportion of their salary on a phone handset, so the market for smartphones in the developing world would be correspondingly small. Wang noticed that, once people saw a smartphone, their readiness to spend on a handset soared. Her findings were ignored as she had ‘too few data points’. However, in reality, all valuable information starts with very little data – the lookout on the Titanic only had one data point . . . ‘Iceberg ahead’, but they were more important than any huge survey on iceberg frequency.

  *A trick borrowed by the designer of the Rolls-Royce radiator grille. ‘Entasis’ is the technical term.

  *First of all, it is not quite fair to excoriate all snake-oil salesmen – in the days before antibiotics, snake oil was quite possibly the best solution available. Genuine snake oil, from the fat of the Chinese water snake, contains 20 per cent eicosapentaenoic acid, which has potent analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties and was used successfully in Chinese medicine for centuries. However, the substance more commonly known as snake oil was a series of concoctions, often high in alcohol or opiates, that claimed to contain snake oil. Typically they might contain a mixture of herbs, possibly to give a plausibly strange taste.

  *There are quite a few misuses of alchemy, which I believe should be outlawed. The insanely low ‘minimum payment’ for credit cards is a black-magic trick that encourages debt, for instance.

  *It is, of course, known as TJ Maxx in the US.

  *A £500 dress feels like a £500 dress when you wear it, even if you bought it for £200 (I am relying on my wife not making it this far into the book).

  *Congratulations to the agency alchemists at Crispin Porter + Bogusky for providing this magic. It can’t have been easy to sell to the client – after all, why do something beneficial and keep it quiet?

  *In my homeland, anyway.

  *I am told that anyone who has had a child be sick in a car with cloth seats immediately becomes a fan of leather ones.

  *It is worth remembering that Professor Kahneman is an academic, and hence a member of a strange caste where having a crappy car seems to be a badge of honour (‘countersignalling’ is the technical term for this). If you want to destroy your academic career in the social sciences on day one, turn up in the university car park in a brand new Ford Mustang (a vintage one might be acceptable at a pinch, but only once you have reached the rank of tenured professor).

  *Perhaps the modern equivalent of saying grace is photographing your food.

  *‘A New Theory explains How Consciousness Evolved’, Atlantic (6 June 2016).

  *No company as far as I know has adopted this approach, I suspect because it would be difficult to sell within an organisation.

  *An admission of a downside makes a claim more plausible. Great advertising taglines often harness this effect – examples include ‘Reassuringly expensive’ and ‘We’re number
two so we try harder.’

  *The ‘Goldilocks effect’ can equally be used by the manufacturers of washing machines who may wish for environmental reasons wish to encourage the use of lower temperature cycles. If you offer a couple of very low temperatures, so that 30 and 40 degrees lie in the middle of the knob, with 60 and 90 degrees to the extreme right, then people will instinctively gravitate towards the lower temperature washes.

  *I was intrigued to discover that a client’s most successful concentrated product (a wood polish) was the one product where its use required an extra stage of effort, in this case diluting it in a small container.

  *This was the 1950s, remember.

  *We are also developing a free plastic clip that allows people to attach a second bin-bag to the outside of their existing bin.

  *Let me make a prediction right here: very few people who buy a Tesla will ever go back to owning a conventional car, because the act of buying it will affect their preferences indelibly. But this lasting change in behaviour will not necessarily have been instigated by care for the environment, any more than people who installed indoor lavatories and baths did so to minimise the risk of a cholera outbreak.

  *‘Friday’ is, to use the terminology of Daniel Kahneman, much more ‘System 1 friendly’ than ‘12/11/17’, requiring less cognitive effort to deliver its meaning.

  *You can try to perform the same alchemy the next time you are on a flight. If a bus appears to take you to the terminal, say out loud to your companion that you are glad, since it will drive you all the way to passport control. You will have increased the happiness levels of everyone within earshot.

  *As Thaler remarks, the argument was rather pointless, since all the offices were of a perfectly adequate size; moreover, the offices on the less fashionable side of the building had the compensation of a view of Robie House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-style masterpieces.

  *Which is where the phrase ‘sour grapes’ comes from – it must surely be one of the oldest metaphors in continuous use.

  *Countries such as Denmark and Sweden may be an exception to this: in both countries the tax rates are egregiously high, but the public expenditure is subject to a high level of democratic and local scrutiny.

  *An item that probably costs little more than £15 to manufacture.

  *I am not alone in thinking this – Shlomo Benartzi from the University of California, Los Angeles, recently proposed something similar to the UK Government.

  *See ‘Save More Tomorrow’, Journal of Political Economy (February 2004). This runs counter to the economic idea of utility, and is often considered to be an example of human irrationality (a ‘bias’) by economists. However, it may be that our brains have evolved to be right and that economists’ assumptions of rationality are wrong. In a path-dependent life, a loss (or, worse still, a series of losses) would bring a higher risk of damaging consequences than an equivalent gain would have benefits. Two or three consecutive losses in quick succession could easily make the difference between survival and extinction.

  *Imagine again what you would do if you were sitting happily at home after dark and suddenly all the lights went out. If you are anything like me, your first reaction would be to look out the window and see whether the other homes on your street are affected. If they are all plunged in darkness, you heave a sigh of relief: ‘Thank God for that – it’s just a power cut, and someone else will need to sort it out.’ The alternative is far worse: ‘Oh shit, it’s just me affected – I’ll have to sort this out for myself.’

  *If I gave someone £400 every month, I’d make quite a lot of noise about it.

  *After all, if it worked and made sense, someone would have done it already.

  *I can’t see any clear reason why it is immoral to take a year off work in your forties, while stopping work altogether at the age of 60 is completely accepted. The pension was designed for a time when most people were dead at 65 and when work often involved gruelling physical toil – we should question whether this is still relevant.

  *Except perhaps four.

  *This is called the Wason selection task, originated in 1966. See P. C. Wason, ‘Reasoning’, in B. M. Foss (ed.), New Horizons in Psychology (1966).

  *In ‘Cognitive Adaptions for Social Exchange’ in J.Barkow et al., The Adapted Mind (1992), Tooby and Cosmides propose that the brain contains various evolved modules that are necessary for coping with different processes – when the card problem is presented as a rule-breaking issue, we have no difficulty solving it, as part of our brain is optimised for such problems. However, when the same conundrum is presented in the less useful language of pure logic we find it difficult, as we don’t have a corresponding module for such abstractions. I am not wholly convinced by this, but it is an interesting idea – and a fascinating experiment.

  *Granted, a slightly inexact use of mathematics.

  *Military strategy is in some ways very much like marketing – you can’t be conventionally logical as a military strategist, because the enemy will be able to predict what you are going to do.

  *Jared Spool, in L.Wroblewski, Web Form Design (2008). In reality, the site didn’t ask for anything during registration that it didn’t need to complete the purchase: the customer’s name, shipping address, billing address and payment information.

  *The Danish physicist, philosopher and Nobel Laureate.

  *Or, as John Maynard Keynes once wrote, ‘Wordly wisdom teaches that it is often better for the reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.’

  *Not a single word of this book has been written in my office – just as David Ogilvy did not write a single advertisement in the office (‘Too many distractions,’ he said). And perhaps 80 per cent of it has been written on days where I had done pretty much nothing the previous day. As John Lennon observed, ‘Time spent doing nothing is rarely wasted’, yet the modern world seems to do all that it can to destroy the moments where alchemy might flourish.

  *If there had once been a view of the sea, it was now obscured by other, equally horrendous apartment blocks.

  *I suspect it isn’t.