Author: Lloyd Morgan
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The Innovation Deficit
Disregarding software and much hyperbole (not necessarily mutually exclusive), one might think that recent times have been an innovation desert. This is the opinion of Newsweek’s Michael Mandel who believes that the lack of innovation over the past decade may be responsible for America’s economic situation. There’s no government-constructed “innovation index” that would allow us to…
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Female Sexuality Research: What Women Want
The question ‘What does a woman want?’ was, according to Freud, “The great question that has never been answered”. One person trying to answer this question, however, is Meredith Chiversâa psychologist specialising in sexual behaviour whose work was extensively discussed in The New York Times earlier this year. The article, focusing on female sexuality, is…
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Economic Experts: Insightful, Biased
Be wary of advice and forecasts from economic ‘experts’, says economist Zachary Karabellânot because they are trying to sell their services or because they are lying, but because they truly believe their (unintentionally) skewed opinions. Being wrong in the past is not much of a liability as long as one is right in the present.…
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Don’t Implement Ideas, Solve Problems
Taking inspiration from Paul Graham’s Ideas for Startups essay, Martin Zwilling offers some further thoughtsâto wit, don’t start with an idea, start with a problem. Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, and there is no market for ideas.…
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Entrepreneurs Not Learning From Mistakes
Entrepreneurial failure is an integral part of eventual success and an important opportunity for learning, or so goes the conventional wisdom (hence in some part the quoteâcommonly attributed to Lisa Amosâthat entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before success). Ignoring the anecdotal success-after-failure stories that stick in peoples’ minds, a team at Harvard Business School decided to…
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How Language Affects Thinking
Linguistic relativity is the idea that language differences alone can affect how we perceive world experiences and thus can cause us to behave differently. In an Edge essay, Lera Boroditsky discusses some of her research into linguistic relativity and how language use (grammar, word choice and language itself) vastly alters our perceptions and thought processes, offering…
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In Defence of Branding
By comparing and contrasting the “two worlds” of direct marketing and brand marketing, Andrew Chen discusses why metrics-driven marketing shouldn’t usurp that of ‘branding’. The nature of internet marketing makes it easy to have a highly accountable, metrics-driven view â but companies that are highly metrics driven easily overlook hard-to-measure issues like brand and user…
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Prosperity, Freedom, Fertility
When it comes to reproduction, are individuals who strive only for personal gainâas Adam Smith stated in The Wealth of Nationsâ”led by an invisible hand [âŚ] to promote the public interest”? In The Tragedy of the Commons, ecologist Garrett Hardin suggested not and called for further government intervention to help control rising populations. Recent studies,…
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Language Incomprehensibility Flowchart (It’s All Greek To Me)
Language Log was asked; When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word one says, it’s “Greek to me”. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it “sounds like Chinese”. [âŚ] Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph? To answer the query, Mark Liberman checks…
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Adoption and Abandonment of Tools and Ideas
Jason’s post discussing economist Lant Pritchett’s thoughts on how people perceive ‘game-changing ideas’ over time Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious. Or, more eloquently: Silly, controversial, progressive, then obvious. reminded me of research on the rise and fall of an item’s popularity that found the fall mirrored the rise. According to the results, the quicker a cultural…