Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Financial and Public Incentives to Perform: What Works

    Large bonuses and salaries are in place to attract prime talent and as an incentive to improve performance, goes conventional wisdom and the bankers’ rhetoric. However recent research by Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) and colleagues suggests that while large pay will attract the best talent, large performance-based bonuses may hinder superior performance. Interestingly big…

  • Optimism as Incentive

    Much has been written on the (ir)rationality of purchasing lottery tickets (Eliezer Yudkowsky’s viewpoint is particularly fine), but little has been said on applications of these biases that could improve the finances of all of those who buy a ticket. Now behavioural economists are attempting to boost the historically poor household savings rate by using our…

  • De Beers and the Diamond Market

    I’ve previously mentioned, in passing, how the concept of the diamond wedding ring was manufactured. I’ve now been reminded of this upon rediscovering Edward Jay Epstein‘s comprehensive 1982 article in The Atlantic charting the story of how De Beers created the entire market for diamonds through supply/demand manipulation and PR. De Beers proved to be the most…

  • How to Disagree

    To aid the understanding and construction of quality arguments, Paul Graham has created a “disagreement hierarchy”: a study on how (and how not) to disagree. We can use this classification system to ensure that when we respond to a person’s reasoning, we respond to it in a way that is constructive for the conversation (by…

  • How to Be Interesting

    Russell Davies offers ten activities that will lead to you being more interesting; including Start a blog, Keep a scrapbook, and Read. I believe you can sum them up into one piece of advice: Do something. Davies compiled the ten activities, believing they will make a person more interesting, based on two assumptions.  However I believe the two assumptions…

  • Derren Brown’s Bertram Effect Experiment Text

    I love the Bertram effect. It’s likely the cognitive bias / psychological experiment that I think of the most. While the text from the original experiment is good, it’s from 1948. In the brilliant Tricks of the Mind and his 2000s TV show of the same name, Derren Brown updated the experiment, using his own text (reproduced…

  • Mistakes on Tests Crucial to Learning

    Thanks to our illusory superiority we consistently overestimate our performance on tests, and, without quality feedback, rapidly become oblivious to the gaps in our knowledge. Furthermore, many consider testing to be an ineffectual tool for assessing performance and errors to be counterproductive to learning. Challenging this preconception is research suggesting that making mistakes on tests–and being…

  • Being a Successful Teacher

    The non-profit organisation Teach For America has, for two decades, been tracking huge amounts of data on its thousands of teachers and the results they get from their students. By mining the data, testing hypotheses and refining hiring and training practises constantly, the organisation says it is now starting to create a reliable profile of…

  • Conversational Mannerisms of Geeks

    I always put up a mental barrier when reading articles such as this as I am of the opinion that it is difficult to successfully produce generalities about a subset of people unless you are quite intimate with their idiosyncrasies. Philip Guo overcame this barrier in his article looking at the conversational behaviours of “geeks,…

  • The Success of James Patterson

    In what is likely the most extensive profile of author James Patterson I’ve read, we are bombarded by a plethora of incredible statistics: Patterson outsells John Grisham, Stephen King and Dan Brown combined; he authored one in every 17 hardback novels bought in the U.S. since 2006; and he has written 51 New York Times bestsellers…