What I Learnt Today

Why do people behave the way they do? And what is the meaning of ‘happiness’?

These questions have been the life work of Daniel Kahneman.

Prof Kahneman may be the only non-economist to win the Noble Prize for Economics (2002). He is professor emeritus of psychology at Princeton University, and is known as one of the ‘fathers’ of the field of Behavioural Economics for his work on the psychology of judgement and decision making. He has often been included in lists of the world’s great thinkers.

In the TED talk below, from October 2010, Professor Kaheman explains that each of us is made up of two selves – the experiencing self and the remembering self.

The experiencing self lives each of the 600 million ‘psychological moments’ that make up our lives. The remembering self ‘keeps score’, and constructs the stories through which we create memory and meaning.

The remembering self is the one that makes most of our decisions. Kahneman makes the point that we seem to choose our vacations in service of the remembering self, rather than the experiencing self – thinking of our future as anticipated memories. Yet we spend very little time ‘consuming’ these memories. (You can think of this the next time you see someone spending their wedding day creating photos, rather than enjoying the ‘experiencing self’.)

The question of whether one is happy therefore is a ‘cognitive trap’. Whether one is satisfied with one’s life in general has a poor correlation with how one is feeling at the moment.

Just recently, Kahneman released his new book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow‘, which describes the two systems that drive the way we think (Intuitive and emotional, or deliberative and logical). It has been judged as one of the best books of 2011.

I think this is a terrific example of a TED talk. We have mentioned TED previously. Incidentally, last week TED  released a new iPad and iPhone app which allows you to download and save selected talks, and also has a ‘radio’ function that automatically streams talks of interest.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html

What I Learnt On 4th December in other years

4th December 2013 Email on your Mac – a brief history. And don’t miss the launch of MailPilot today!

Hey Rocky, Watch Me Pull a Rabbit out of my Hat

But that trick never works.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love learning magic tricks.

Libraries used to be the best place to source new stuff- classic texts such as ‘The Rpyal Road to Card Magic’ and the ‘Tarbell Course in Magic’ haven’t been surpassed.

Magic tricks have always been expensive to buy – most of the cost of a trick is the secret, rather than the equipment itself.  It has also been difficult to access in Australia. When I was growing up, Sydney’s only magic shop was  ‘Weirdo’s’, in the Windsor Arcade – now long gone. Hey Presto (84 Pitt St) has taken its place.

The Internet has completely changed the way magic is sold. DVDs and ‘gimmicks’ can be purchased easily from the USA, or in some cases downloaded ‘instantly’. Even when buying locally, you can preview tricks online, and read reviews by professionals at sites such as The Magic Cafe.

Penguin Magic is to magic as Amazon is to books. It is the big daddy of online magic shops – with thousands of tricks. Most have video previews.

At the moment, Penguin Magic is offering ‘The Greatest Beginner Magic DVD Ever‘ for free! The downloadable DVD features well known magic teacher Oz Pearlman, and runs for fwo hours. All the equipment needed is readily available at home – and you can download it instantly.

That is most definitely good value.

Penguin know that half the fun is the anticipation of waiting for a trick to arrive once you have ordered it. They add to the excitement by providing a link to a video of your own order being packed in their warehouse. This is the video of my recent purchase being packed. Now I really can’t wait for Santa to arrive.

Here’s some more real magic from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Baz Lurhman had a hit single called ‘Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen‘ in 1999. The lyrics are taken from an essay “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young“, written by columnist Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1st 1997. 

PS Noone should watch the John Saffron version, which includes advice like:

Wear sunscreen, but only if its that coconut oil that gives you cancer. Keep your old love letters. If you see an old lover in the street, try to run them over in your car. Don’t mess too much with your hair, otherwise by the time you’re 35, you’ll look like Greg Matthews. 

Learn how to smoke Winnie blues. If you’re underaged, get an older kid to buy them for you.  

Travel as often as you can. Live in New York City once. Live in northern California once. Never live in Adelaide – it’s a hole.

When you live in a country town, you soon learn that everyone is directly connected to everyone else.

Even in a large city like Sydney, its unusual if someone you meet doesn’t know a friend of a friend.

But did you know that if you meet a stranger anywhere in the world, whatever remote spot, its likely that a friend of a friend of yours will be a friend of a friend of their’s?

The film ‘Six Degrees of Seperation’ postulates that everyone in the world can be connected to anyone else through six hops. A 1960’s study by Stanley Milgram involving 290 people seemed to confirm this.

The Facebook data team have anaylsed the connections between all 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them.

Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, we were able to approximate the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.

Which confirms two things.

It is a small world, after all.

And If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all/ It’s sure to get back to them in just a few hops.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/anatomy-of-facebook/10150388…