Working over many years with several Indigenous Elders, Duane has published The First Astronomers, a complete overview of traditional First Nations star knowledge.
A great introduction to the book The First Astronomers.
Get ready for a new influx of mnemonists. Bill Gates just highlighted Josh Foer’s book in his blogpost “5 summer books and other things to do at home”. His recommendations typically drive a lot of book sales.
The wrapper for the cards has title: Geometre and the mechanick powers represented in a pack of playing cards, made and sold by J Moxon att the Attlas in Warwick lane London.
First part (p. 1-53) probably written by Joseph Moxon.
BEIN K8 D44 Rg697: Imperfect: t.p. and p. 85 badly mutilated and mounted; wrapper frayed and mounted.
Physical Description:
1 p.l., 85 p. ; 17 cm. and 52 cards (in engr. wrapper) 9 x 6 cm.
The use of this image may be subject to the copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) or to site license or other rights management terms and conditions. The person using the image is liable for any infringement.
This was probably a great memory exercise for Monsi. Des-Cartes in simply making these. But on first blush, I have to think that he’s also creating a memory palace of sorts for the information itself! Because the deck of cards can be a predetermined path of sorts, going through the deck in the prescribed order he’s laid out allows it to be a journey to which he’s attaching the images on the cards as well as encoding the information within the text by which to memorize it. To me this is very reminiscent of the “Sermon on the Six Wings of the Seraph” described as:
The earliest of the four preachers’ arts is the so-called sermon on the six wings of the seraph, using as the organizing figure the six-winged creature described in Isaiah 6. Ascribed to the late twelfth-century Parisian master Alan of Lille, it became quickly popular as one of the model sermons of his ‘‘art of preaching.’’ But it is not a sermon. It is instead an art for preachers needing to invent sermons. It describes how to use sets of five themes on each of six basic subjects, or res, all keyed to a memorable organizing ‘‘picture.’’ Only the first of these themes is developed as an actual sermon might be, evidently to serve as a model. The work as a whole provides a fine example of memoria rerum and is related, through centuries of (mostly orally disseminated) classroom tradition, to the picture-like example of the technique of memoria rerum used in a courtroom setting, which is described at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.20.33).
— The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Edited by Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)
Color copy of an illuminated manuscript featuring a six winged seraph with memory prompts written on individual feathers via the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University from The tower of virtues and the orchard of spiritual grace MS 416, fol. 8r.
Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker,…
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
McCulloch was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m. ❧
Now that is a business card title!
March 03, 2019 at 06:01PM
McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence. ❧
tl;dr
March 03, 2019 at 06:06PM
Gottfried Leibniz. The 17th-century philosopher had attempted to create an alphabet of human thought, each letter of which represented a concept and could be combined and manipulated according to a set of logical rules to compute all knowledge—a vision that promised to transform the imperfect outside world into the rational sanctuary of a library. ❧
I don’t think I’ve ever heard this quirky story…
March 03, 2019 at 06:08PM
Which got McCulloch thinking about neurons. He knew that each of the brain’s nerve cells only fires after a minimum threshold has been reached: Enough of its neighboring nerve cells must send signals across the neuron’s synapses before it will fire off its own electrical spike. It occurred to McCulloch that this set-up was binary—either the neuron fires or it doesn’t. A neuron’s signal, he realized, is a proposition, and neurons seemed to work like logic gates, taking in multiple inputs and producing a single output. By varying a neuron’s firing threshold, it could be made to perform “and,” “or,” and “not” functions. ❧
I’m curious what year this was, particularly in relation to Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis in which he applied Boolean algebra to electronics.
Based on their meeting date, it would have to be after 1940.And they published in 1943: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02478259
March 03, 2019 at 06:14PM
McCulloch and Pitts alone would pour the whiskey, hunker down, and attempt to build a computational brain from the neuron up. ❧
A nice way to pass the time to be sure. Naturally mathematicians would have been turning “coffee into theorems” instead of whiskey.
March 03, 2019 at 06:15PM
“an idea wrenched out of time.” In other words, a memory. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:17PM
McCulloch and Pitts wrote up their findings in a now-seminal paper, “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. ❧
I really like this picture here. Perhaps for a business card? ❧ March 03, 2019 at 06:23PM
it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content. ❧
Oops, I think this article is confusing Wiener with Claude Shannon?
March 03, 2019 at 06:34PM
By the fall of 1943, Pitts had moved into a Cambridge apartment, was enrolled as a special student at MIT, and was studying under one of the most influential scientists in the world. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:32PM
Thus formed the beginnings of the group who would become known as the cyberneticians, with Wiener, Pitts, McCulloch, Lettvin, and von Neumann its core. ❧
Wiener always did like cyberneticians for it’s parallelism with mathematicians….
March 03, 2019 at 06:38PM
In the entire report, he cited only a single paper: “A Logical Calculus” by McCulloch and Pitts. ❧
First Draft of a Report on EDVAC by jon von Neumann
March 03, 2019 at 06:43PM
Oliver Selfridge, an MIT student who would become “the father of machine perception”; Hyman Minsky, the future economist; and Lettvin. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:44PM
at the Second Cybernetic Conference, Pitts announced that he was writing his doctoral dissertation on probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:44PM
In June 1954, Fortune magazine ran an article featuring the 20 most talented scientists under 40; Pitts was featured, next to Claude Shannon and James Watson. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:46PM
Lettvin, along with the young neuroscientist Patrick Wall, joined McCulloch and Pitts at their new headquarters in Building 20 on Vassar Street. They posted a sign on the door: Experimental Epistemology. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:47PM
“The eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted,” they reported in the now-seminal paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” published in 1959. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:50PM
There was a catch, though: This symbolic abstraction made the world transparent but the brain opaque. Once everything had been reduced to information governed by logic, the actual mechanics ceased to matter—the tradeoff for universal computation was ontology. Von Neumann was the first to see the problem. He expressed his concern to Wiener in a letter that anticipated the coming split between artificial intelligence on one side and neuroscience on the other. “After the great positive contribution of Turing-cum-Pitts-and-McCulloch is assimilated,” he wrote, “the situation is rather worse than better than before. Indeed these authors have demonstrated in absolute and hopeless generality that anything and everything … can be done by an appropriate mechanism, and specifically by a neural mechanism—and that even one, definite mechanism can be ‘universal.’ Inverting the argument: Nothing that we may know or learn about the functioning of the organism can give, without ‘microscopic,’ cytological work any clues regarding the further details of the neural mechanism.” ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:54PM
Nature had chosen the messiness of life over the austerity of logic, a choice Pitts likely could not comprehend. He had no way of knowing that while his ideas about the biological brain were not panning out, they were setting in motion the age of digital computing, the neural network approach to machine learning, and the so-called connectionist philosophy of mind. ❧
March 03, 2019 at 06:55PM
by stringing them together exactly as Pitts and McCulloch had discovered, you could carry out any computation. ❧
I feel like this is something more akin to what may have been already known from Boolean algebra and Whitehead/Russell by this time. Certainly Shannon would have known of it?
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Business & Economics
Random House Incorporated
January 2, 2007
Hardcover
291
A groundbreaking resource for those who need to deliver a memorable message introduces six key principles that help make messages stick--simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories--and explains how to incorporate each of these factors into the creative thought process. 100,000 first printing.
An awesome and quick read. I love that in some sense, they actually use their own advice when writing this to make some of their own ideas a bit more sticky. I thought this was a good little read and provides some interesting and very useful and actionable ideas. Definitely worth reviewing over some of the ideas in the near future for some writing I have in mind. I’d definitely recommend it to marketing people and communicators. I’d also love to delve further into some of their references.
Finally publishing this publicly with all the Highlights, Quotes, Marginalia, etc.
Reading Progress
12/28/17 marked as: want to read; “This seemed interesting in the library when I browsed by, so I picked it up. Seems a quick/easy read. Covers some interesting material related to ars memorativa which I may find interesting. They also make some references to schema within Hollywood, so that may be useful too.”
Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea?
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 5
How many times have I thought of this very topic? Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
When we get advice on communicating, it often concerns our delivery: “Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don’t sound canned).” Sometimes we get advice about structure “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. Tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Or “Start by getting their attention–tell a joke or a story.”
Another genre concerns knowing your audience: “know what your listeners care about so you can tailor your communication to them.” And, finally, there’s the most common refrain in the realm of communication advice: Use repetition, repetition, repetition.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 9
The common refrains, many of which can be useless. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance?
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 10
This can be the holy grail of teaching… Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
What makes urban legends so compelling? […] Why does virtually every society circulate a set of proverbs? Why do some political ideas circulate widely while others fall short?
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 12
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
This book is a complement to The Tipping Point [by Malcolm Gladwell] in the sense that it will identify the traits that make ideas sticky, a subject that was beyond the scope of Gladwell’s book.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 13
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 14
I’ve always suspected that this was the case but never saw any evidence or reportage that back up this common Halloween myth. In fact, I recall taking candy to local hospitals for radio-graphic exams. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It’s your family you should worry about.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 14
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Introduction: Six Principles of Sticky Ideas
Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common activity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both stories called for simple action […] both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory […] and both stories tapped into emotion: [fear… disgust…]
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 14-15
Many of these strike a cord from my memory training, which I suspect plays a tremendous part. Particularly the vividly clear and concrete details. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
There is no “formula” for a sticky idea–we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 15
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
… we an genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 16
This isn’t far from my idea of genetically engineering memes when I read Dawkins back in the day… Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Simplicity […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.
Unexpectedness
Concretness […] because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
Credibility
Emotions […] We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.
Stories
[…] To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. […] S.U.C.C.E.S.s
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 16-18
This seems to be the forthcoming core of the book. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
It’s not as though there’s a powerful constituency for overcomplicated, lifeless prose.
Highlight (blue) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 5
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 19
The example they give of the [music] Tappers and Listeners is great to illustrate the Curse of Knowledge. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction: What Sticks? > Page 20
The JFK pitch to get a man on the moon was a great example here. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Introduction: Systematic Creativity
They found that 89 percent of the award-winning ads could be classified into six basic categories, or templates. […] (For the other templates,
see the endnotes.) […] Amazingly, when the researchers tried to classify these “less successful” ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them [using the previous 6 categories]. […] It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas.
This is some very interesting data. I should track this reference down. Particularly when they did the follow up of training groups in these methods (or not) and realizing that those with the templates did far better with minimal training. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Chapter 1: Simple
The [Army] plans often turn out to be useless.
“The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy,” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point.
“You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen–the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expect.
Highlight (yellow) – Chapter 1: Simple > Page 25
aka Complexity… Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
So, in the 1980’s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).
Highlight (yellow) – Chapter 1: Simple > Page 26
The way to plan around complexity to some extent. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. […]
What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea. […] Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent.
The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Some interesting examples in the sections on “Finding the Core at Southwest Airlines”, “Burying the Lead”, “If you Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything.”, and “Decision Paralysis” Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Proverbs are simple yet profound. Cervantes defined proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience.”
Highlight (yellow) – Chapter 1: Simple “A Bird in the Hand” > Page 47
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
The first documented case in English is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. But the proverb may be much older still.
Highlight (yellow) – Chapter 1: Simple > Page 47
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
J FKFB INAT OUP SNA SAI RS
vs
JFK FBI NATO UPS NASA IRS
A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas:
A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like a pyramid.
I’m not sure of the background of the actual pitch, but a little massaging really makes E.T. the tried and true story of a boy and his dog, but this time the dog is an alien! So again, it really is an analogy to another prior film, namely Lassie! Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions,
explanations, and inventions.”
Contrast Disney with Subway. Like Disney, Subway has created a metaphor for its frontline employees. They are “sandwich artists.” This metaphor is the evil twin of Disney’s “cast members.”
Evil twin indeed. There’s nothing artistic about their work at all. Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Chapter 2 Unexpected
And if a well-designed message can make people applaud for a safety announcement there’s hope for all of us.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 64
Added on January 15, 2018
Most of the time, though, we can’t demand attention; we must attract it.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 64
Added on January 15, 2018
The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory timulation makes us tune out[…]
Highlight (yellow) – > page 64
Added on January 15, 2018
Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 65
Added on January 15, 2018
This chapter focuses on two essential questions: How do I get people’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it?
Highlight (yellow) – > page 65
Added on January 15, 2018
…we have to understand two essential emotions–surprise and interest–[…]
Highlight (yellow) – > page 65
Added on January 15, 2018
And minivans deliver kids to soccer practice. No one dies, ever.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 67
Added on January 15, 2018
Our schemas are like guessing machines. Schemas help us predict what will happen and, consequently , how we should make decisions.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 67
Added on January 15, 2018
Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for different ways of acting and thinking.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 67
Added on January 15, 2018
For instance, a secondary effect of being angry … is that we become more certain of our judgements. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 67
Added on January 15, 2018
When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 67
Added on January 15, 2018
In a book called Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen coined the term, “the surprise brow,” …
Highlight (yellow) – > page 68
Added on January 15, 2018
When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision–the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 68
Added on January 15, 2018
…when we’re angry our eyes narrow so we can focus on a known problem. In addition to making our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our mouths to gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies temporarily stop moving and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our bodies want to ensure that we’re not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 68
Added on January 15, 2018
Researchers who study conspiracy theories, for instance, have noted that many of them arise when people are grappling with unexpected events, such as when the young and attractive die suddenly. […] There tends to be less conspiratorial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year olds.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 68-69
Added on January 15, 2018
What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need insight. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.”
Highlight (yellow) – Section Hension and Phraug > page 70-71
Added on January 16, 2018
So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate–find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message–i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isnt it already happening naturally? (3) Comjmunicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. […] It’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Hension and Phraug > page 72
this could be done for the typical romantic ads about having a baby being a special time of life that’s cute and you don’t want to miss. really it’s traumatic and potentially life threatening and fragile. You HAVE to stop to re-adjust to your new life or you may end up losing your new precious someone (or worse, yourself.) Example is a California PSA ad that I heard on 3/13/18 on the radio. Added on January 16, 2018
To make a message stick, you’ve got to push it beyond common sense to uncommon sense.
“But,” says [social psychologist Robert] Cialdini, “I also found something I had not expected–the most successful of these pieces [scientists writing for an audience of non-scientists] all began with a mystery story.”
Highlight (yellow) – Section Keeping People’s Attention / The Mystery of the Rings > page 80
Added on January 16, 2018
Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. […] Cialdini began to create mysteries in his own classroom, and the power of the approach quickly became clear. He would introduce the mystery at the start of class, return to it during the lecture, and reveal the answer at the end.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Keeping People’s Attention / The Mystery of the Rings > page 81
Sol Golomb used to do this with brain teasers at the start of class, presumably to catch the attention of bored students who could puzzle on it during class. I also suspected he used it to help identify creative thinkers and students smarter than their classwork might indicate. Added on January 16, 2018
Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey. […] A schema violation is a onetime transaction. […] We would call it “first-level” unexpectedness. […]we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Keeping People’s Attention / The Mystery of the Rings > page 82
Added on January 16, 2018
[Robert] McKee says, “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” […] In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. the audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out?
Highlight (yellow) – Section Keeping People’s Attention / The Mystery of the Rings > page 83
Added on January 16, 2018
In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of situational interest. It is surprisingly simple. Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity > page 84
Added on January 16, 2018
Pokemon cards cause kids to wonder, Which characters am I missing?
One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something that they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps–What will happen? and Was I right?.
As an example, most local news programs run teaser ads for upcoming broadcasts. […] These are sensationalist examples of the gap theory. They work because they tease you with something tat you don’t know–in fact, something that you didn’t care about at all, until you found out that you didn’t know it.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity > page 85
Added on January 16, 2018
The improvement here is driven by structure, not content. Let’s face it, this is not a particularly interesting mystery.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity > page 87
Added on January 16, 2018
Research has shown that we are typically overconfident about how much we know.
The average participant failed to identify more than 70 percent of the best solutions identified by an expert panel. This failure is understandable; we wouldn’t expect any one person to be able to generate a database worth of solutions. However, when the individuals were asked to assess their own performance, they predicted that they had identified 75 percent. They thought they got the majority, but in reality they’d missed them.
He’s set up his own mystery here… What are the others? (ways to reduce demand for parking example) Added on January 16, 2018
Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as “concept testing”. Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.
Overconfident people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with the. Nancy Lowry and David Johnson [study] one grou, the discussion was led in a way that fostered a consensus. With the second group, the discussion was designed to produce disagreements about the right answer.
Students who achieved easy consensus were less interested in the topic, studied less, and were less likely to visit the library to get additional information.
Example of ABC’s NCAA football games and Roone Arledge memo about setting the stage for games Added on January 16, 2018
Here’s the idea Ibuka proposed to his team: a “pocketable radio.”
Highlight (yellow) – Section Walking on the Moon and Radios in Pockets > page 94
similar to Bill Gates’ “a computer on every desktop” Added on January 16, 2018
Loewenstein, the author of the gap theory, says it’s important to remember that knowledge gaps are painful. “If people _like_ curiosity, why do they work to resolve it?” he asks.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Walking on the Moon and Radios in Pockets > page 94
Questions about biology early on pushed me personally… Added on January 16, 2018
Chapter 3 Concrete
Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in different ways. Concreteness helps us to avoid these problems.
Highlight (yellow) – > page 100
Not good for mathematics then is it? Added on January 16, 2018
California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Nature Conservancy > page 100
Added on January 16, 2018
How could TNC make the new strategy more concrete
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Nature Conservancy > page 101
Added on January 16, 2018
Here’s what the TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a “landscape.” … Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more concrete.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Nature Conservancy > page 102
Added on January 16, 2018
Concreteness is an indespensable component of sticky ideas.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Nature Conservancy > page 104
Added on January 16, 2018
Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.
Teachers take an existing schema–the dynamics of a six person ball game–and overlay a new layer of abstraction. [Using stick figures to count up players.] The researchers called this style of questioning Computing in Context. It is pretty much the opposite of “rote recall.”
What is it about concreteness that makes ideas stick? The answer lies with the nature of our memories.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Velcro Theory of Memory > page 109
this is exactly the underlying theory of the ars memorativa Added on January 16, 2018
If the phrase, “Hey Jude” drew a blank, please exchange this book for a Beatles album. You’ll be happier.”
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Velcro Theory of Memory > page 110
HA! What a great little aside here. Added on January 16, 2018
Highlight (yellow) – Section Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes > page 111
great example here of a teacher who used blue/brown eyes to discriminate on students in a classroom and making them sit in the back of the room. Added on January 16, 2018
Instead, Elliott [the teacher] turned prejudice into an _experience_. Think of the “hooks” involved: The sight of a friend suddenly snearing at you. The feel of a collar around your neck.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes > page 113
Added on January 16, 2018
But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction?
The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. […] And here is where our classic villain, the Curse of Knowledge, inserts itself.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Path to Abstraction: The Blueprint and the Machine > page 113-114
Added on January 16, 2018
…the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Path to Abstraction: The Blueprint and the Machine > page 115
think about the problem of the engineers talking with the manufacturers on the floor speaking a common language Added on January 16, 2018
Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.” [compared to it must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to NYC and land on a short sub-1 mile runway.]
“Almost everything we [Stone Yamashita Partners, a small consulting firm in San Francisco] do is visceral and visual,” Keith yamashita says. The “product” of most consulting firms is often a PowerPoint presentation. At Stone Yamashita, it’s much more likely to be a simulation, an event, or a creative installation.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Ferraris Go to Disney World in the R&D Lab > page 117
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The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalist to brainstorm, in the same what that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” [versus white things in general] made it easier for us to brainstorm.
Highlight (yellow) – Section [Jerry] Kaplan and Go Computers > page 120
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…Studzinski learned that moms and their kids valued predictability. […] But Hamburger Helper had more than thirdy different flavors, and moms struggled to find their favorites among the massive grocery-store displays. […] “Moms saw new flavors as risky,” she says.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Making Ideas Concrete > page 127
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By making Saddleback Sam and Samantha a living, breathing, concrete presence in the minds of the members of the Saddleback Church, the church has managed to reach 50,000 real Sams and Samanthas.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Making Ideas Concrete > page 129
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Of the six traits of stickiness that we review in this book, concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of th traits.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Making Ideas Concrete > page 129
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Chapter 4 Credible
Ulcers are caused by bacteria. The researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, identified a tiny spiral-shaped type of bacteria [Helicobacter pylori] as the culprit.
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The medical community expects important discoveries to come from Ph.D.s at research universities or professors at large, world-class medical centers. Internists do not cure diseases that affect 10 percent of the world’s population.
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Let’s pose the question in the broadest possible terms: What makes people believe ideas?
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When we think of authorities who can add credibility, we tend to think of two kinds of people. The first kind is the expert–the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials. […] Celebrities and other aspirations figures make up the second class of “authorities.” […] Why do we care that Michael Jordan likes… ..We care because we want to be like Mike,… We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like.
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This is why even horrible celebrity endorsements work for advertising. Added on January 16, 2018
Can we find external sources of credibility taht don’t involve celebrities or experts? [Yes.] We can tape the credibility of anti-authorities.
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example of Pam Laffin, the anti-smoking icon who had emphysema by 24 and used her personal story to show the vagaries of smoking. Added on January 16, 2018
[Greg] Connolly [director of tobacco control for the Massachussetts Department of Public Health] said, “What we’ve learned from previous campaigns is that telling stories using real people is the most compelling way.”
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The takeaway is that it can be the _honesty and trustworthiness_ of our sources, not their _status_, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.
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Take the teens of the Parkland Shootings in March 2018 as examples for moving the needle on the gun control debate. Added on January 16, 2018
An expert on folk legends, Jan Brunvand, says that legends “acquire a good deal of their credibility and effect from their localized details.” A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. […] But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the _authorities_ who provid them; they lend credibility to the idea itself. The Civil War anecdote, with lots of interesting details, is credible in _anyone’s_ telling. By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.
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In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis […] created an experiment to simulat a trial. […] The jurors were asked to assess the fitness of a mother, Mrs. Johnson, and to decicd whether her seven-year-old son should remain in her care. […] So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Johnson is a good mother.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Jurors and the Darth Vader Toothbrush > page 138-139
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…vivid details boost credibility. […] …we need to make use of truthful, core details. …details that symbolize and support our core idea.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Jurors and the Darth Vader Toothbrush > page 139
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The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility–to weave sources of credibility into the ide aitself. Another way is to use statistics.
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“This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic.”
Highlight (yellow) – Section Beyond War > page 142
Talking about BB example: One BB: This is Hiroshima. Lot’s of BBs, this is the world’s stockpile (paraphrase) Added on January 16, 2018
The point was to hit people in the gut with the realization that this was a problem that was out of control. […] Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
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The soccer [team] analogy generates a human context for the statistics. it creates a sense of drama and a sense of movement. We can’t help but imagine the actions of the two players trying to score a goal, being opposed at every stage by the rest of their team. […] It relies on our schema of soccer teams and the fact that this schema is somehow cleaner, more well-defined, than our schema of organizations.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Human-Scale Principle > page 145
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Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so. […] The right scale changes everything.
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“A bag of popcorn has as much Vitamin J as 71 pounds of broccoli!” (We made this up.)
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Human-Scale Principle > page 147
I like that they made it J to make it feel false if retold. Added on January 16, 2018
When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Human-Scale Principle > page 147
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It’s the Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. [example of Safexpress delivering the Harry Potter books in India]
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Sinatra Test and Safexpress > page 151
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For an example that unites all three of the “internal credibility” sources–details, statistics, and the Sinatra test–we can turn to Bill McDonough, an environmentalist know for helping companies improve both the environment and the bottom line.
selling chemical free fabric for Steelcase chairs Added on January 16, 2018
Instead, the commercials developed a brand-new source of credibility: the audience. Wendy’s outsourced its credibility to customers. […] To use scientific language, Wendy’s made a falsifiable claim.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Where’s the Beef? > page 157
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[on examples: Snapple slave ship and circle K (Kosher) as a Klan ownership symbol] This is how testable credentials can backfire–the “see for yourself” step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.
Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
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When people think analytically, they’re less like to think emotionally. […] The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
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For people to take action, they have to care. […] Charities have long since figured out the Mother Teresa effect–they know that donors respond better to individuals than to abstract causes.
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The good news is that to make people care about our ideas we don’t have to produce emotion from an absence of emotion. In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Semantic Stretch and the Power of Association > page 171
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Research conducted at Stanford and Yale shows that this process–exploiting terms and concepts for their emotional associations–is a common characteristic of communication. People tend to overuse any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick. The research labeled this overuse “semantic stretch”.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Semantic Stretch and the Power of Association > page 173
related to why typefaces seem “old” after a while. Added on January 28, 2018
“Unique” used to mean one of a kind. “Unique” was special. […] Over time, associations get overused and become diluted in value; people end up saying things like “This is really, truly unique.”
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One woman told Thompson that her high school basketball coach sad that if his players ever won a sportsmanship trophy, they’d have to run laps.
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The called it Honoring the Game.
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The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Semantic Stretch: The Case of “Sportsmanship” > page 176
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In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typeswriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano…But When I Started to Play!”
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Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. […] The old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarte-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.
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We get uncomfortable looking at Caples’s handiwork: Many of his ads are shady. Deceptive. The Magnetic Personality Kit may enjoy a conscience-free existence, but most of us aspire to a working relationship with the truth.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Appealing to Self-interest > page 179
Magnetic Personality Kit people are reminiscent of Donald J. Trump and his administration Added on January 28, 2018
The first lesson is not to overlook self-interest. Jerry Weissman, a former TV producer and screenwriter who coaches CEOs in how to deliver speeches, says that you shouldn’t dance around the appeal to self-interest. He says that the WIIFY–“what’s in it for you,” pronounced wiffy-y–should be a central aspect of every speech.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Appealing to Self-interest > page 179
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Teachers are all too familiar with the student refrain “How are we ever going to use this?” In other words, what’s in it for me?
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If you’ve got self-interest on your side, don’t bury it. Don’t talk around it.
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Highlight (yellow) – Section Cable TV in Tempe > page 180
synopsis: 1982 psychologists persuasion study of homeowners. Being told about the benefits of cable vs. imagining how cable will improve your live. Added on January 28, 2018
Go back and count up the number of times the word “you” appears in each appeal.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Cable TV in Tempe > page 180
more in the second of imagining yourself…. Added on January 28, 2018
The Arizona study, though, took it a step further. It asked people to visualize the feeling of security they would get by using [the product].
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This is just how the mnemotechniques work Added on January 28, 2018
The research paper, when it was published, was subtitled “Does Imagining Make it So?” The answer was yes.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Cable TV in Tempe > page 180
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Compared with a typical mail-order ad, the “imagine cable television” appeal is a much more subtle appeal to self-interest. […] This finding suggest that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.
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Maslow’s Pyramid, or Maslow’s Heirarch of Needs.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Maslow > page 183
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Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus–people persue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Maslow > page 183
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He’s clear about his leadership mission: “As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of Morale.”
Think about that: I am in charge of morale. In terms of Maslow’s hierarch, [Floyd] Lee is going for Transcendence.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Dining in Iraq > page 186
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It’s the attitude that makes the difference. […] Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves a creativity and experimentation and mastery. Serving food involves a ladle.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Dining in Iraq > page 187
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So, sometimes self-interest helps people care, and sometimes it backfires. What are we to make of this?
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Popcorn Popper and Political Science > page 188
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1998, Donald Kinder, a professor of political science at University of Michigan, wrote an influential survey of thirty years of
Highlight (green) – Section The Popcorn Popper and Political Science > page 188
This has the example of firefighters needing a payout of a popcorn popper to watch fire prevention video Added on January 28, 2018
And perhaps the most important part of the story is this: “Group interest” is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest. Kinder says that in forming opinions people seem to ask not “What’s in it for me?” but rather, “What’s in it for my group?” Our group affiliation may be used based on race, class, religion, gender, region, political party, industry, or countless of other dimensions of difference.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Popcorn Popper and Political Science > page 189
and here’s where politics changed drastically in America after 1998 Added on January 28, 2018
A related idea comes from James March, a professor at Stanford University, who proposes that we use two basic models to make decisions. The first model involves calculating consequences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value. This model is the standard view of decision-making in economics classes: People are self-interested and rational. [..] The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Popcorn Popper and Political Science > page 189
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Instead, [Floyd Lee] helped create a kind of Pegasus identity: A Pegasus chef is in charge of morale, not food. You can imagine hundreds of decisions being made by staffers in the tent who think to themselves, What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Popcorn Popper and Political Science > page 191
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MATH IS MENTAL WEIGHT TRAINING. It is a means to an end, (for most people), not an end in itself.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Clinic: The Need for Algebra and Maslow’s Basement > page 194
And for those that don’t, they are mathematicians. Added on January 28, 2018
🔖 example about litter in Texas: “Don’t Mess with Texas”
So far we’ve looked at three strategies for making people care: using associations (or avoiding associations, as the case may be), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity. …but we’ve got to watch out for our old nemesis, the Curse of Knowledge, which can interfere with our ability to implement them.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 199
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One of the exercises was intended to help the leaders articulate and refine the core mission of their organization. The questions put to the attendees were difficult ones: Why does your organization exist? Can other organizations do what you do–and if so, what is it you do that is unique?
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 199
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The mission to “preserve duo piano music” was effective and meaningful inside Murray Dranoff, but outside the organization it was opaque.
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It’s easy to forget taht you’re the tapper and the world is the listener.
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By asking “Why?” three times, the duo piano group moved from talking about what they were doing to why they were doing it.
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This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. […] Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underly our ideas.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Music of Duo Piano > page 201
Put into wiki in IWC. Why webmention? Fundamental to the interconnection of the web and how it works. LINKS! {example of IDEO creating simulations that make people realize problems exist} Added on January 28, 2018
simulations that drive employees to empathize with their customers.
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This realization–that empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern–bings us back full circle to the Mother Teresa quote… […] How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities–not only to be the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.
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Chapter 6 Stories
Later, the group realized why the heart monitor misled them. It is designed to measure electrical activity, not actual heartbeats.
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The story about the baby appears in a chapter called “The Power of Stories,” in [Gary] Klein’s book Sources of Power. Klein says that, in the environments he studies, stories are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are effective teaching tools. The show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions.
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The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). […] An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.
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🔖 Shop Talk in the Xerox Lunchroom
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🔖 The Un-passive Audience
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Maybe financial gurus should be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.
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what about Napoleon Hill’s popularity Added on January 28, 2018
Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity.
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Mental simulations help us manage emotions.
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Perhaps most surprisingly, mental simulation can also build skills. A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone–sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish–improves performance significantly. […] Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical actiivty (e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice alone produced about two-thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.
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Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.
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The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.
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What about math problems? Added on January 28, 2018
We must fight the temptation to skip directly to the “tips” and leave out the story.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Clinic: Dealing with Problem Students > page 217
It’s also the value of the stories told in this very book! (Good to see them following their own advice.) Added on January 28, 2018
And this is the second major payoff that stories provide: inspiration. Inspiration drives action, as does simulation.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories as Inspiration: The Tale of Jared > page 222
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The national advertising director, who had a lifetime of experience in trying to make ideas stick, wanted to walk away from the Jared story.
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Jared reminds us that we don’t always have to create sticky ideas. Spotting them is often easier and more useful. What if history teachers were diligent about sharing teaching methods that worked brilliantly in teaching students?
Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories as Inspiration: The Tale of Jared > page 224
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Just as there are ad templates that have been proven effective, so, too, there are story templates that have been proven effective. Learning the templates gives our spotting ability a huge boost.
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Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on. When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories–a much narrower domain–we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.
These three basic plots can be used to classify more than 80 percent of the stories that appear in the original Chicken Soup collection. Perhaps more suprisingly, they can also be used to classify more than 60 percent of the stories published by People magazine about people who aren’t celebrities.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Art of Spotting > page 225
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The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Challenge Plot > page 226
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There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Challenge Plot > page 226
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That [the story of the Good Samaritan] is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap–racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Connection Plot > page 228
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Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Connection Plot > page 228
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The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a proble in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot.
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In the history of the [Ingersoll Rand] Grinder Team, this story has become known as the Drag Test. The Drag Test is a Creativity plot that reinforced the team’s new culture. The Drag Test [dragging material behind their cars instead of traditional lab tests] implied, “We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker.”
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Creativity Plot > page 230
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“How wonderful! They’ve stolen my idea. It’s become their idea!”
Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories at the World Bank > page 233
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In 2001, he [Stephen Denning] wrote a very insightful book called The Springboard. Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities.
One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories at the World Bank > page 233
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The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’r implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument–judge it, debate it, criticize it–and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience–you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
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A springboard story helps us problem-solve for ourselves. A springboard story is an exercise in mass customization–each audience member uses the story as a springboard to slightly different destinations.
Highlight (yellow) – Section Stories at the World Bank > page 234
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🔖 example: Gary Klein taking stories out of a conference as an overview of what happened instead of pithy one-liners.
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Conference Storybook > page 237
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Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is makig sure that they’re Simple–that they reflect your core message. […] Stories hav ethe amazing dual power to simulate and inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much crativity to harness these powers–we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.
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Epilogue: What Sticks
[In 1946, Leo] Durocher [coach of the Dodgers] pointed at the Giant’s dugout and said, “Nice guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than [Giant’s manager] Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world! And where are thy? In seventh place!” As recounted by Ralph Keyes in his book on misquotations, Nice Guys Finish Seventh… [this quote] emerged as a cynical comment on life: “Nice guys finish last.”
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[Sherlock] Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
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…in making ideas stick, the audience gets a vote. The audience may change the meaning of your idea, as happened with Durocher. The audience may actually improve your idea, as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. O the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others, as with [James] Carville [,who used had three phrases: “It’s the economy, stupid”, “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care”, only one of which stuck.]
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Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.
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The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions.
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…we can also put on Core Idea Glasses, allowing us to filter incoming ideas from that perspective.
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If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.
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[Talking about Chip’s student exercise in class:] In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one studen in ten tells a story. Those are the spaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.
Furthermore, almost no correlation emerges between “speaking talent” and the ability to make ideas stick.
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The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories or by tapping into emotion…
Highlight (yellow) – Section The Speakers and the Stickers > page 243
double entendre for this book as they’ve previously mentioned “tapping” out music…. Added on January 28, 2018
The first is decision paralysis–the anxiety and irrationality that can emerge from excessive choice or ambiguous situations. […] To beat decision paralysis, communicators have to do the hard work of finding the core.
Highlight (yellow) – Section More Villains > page 244
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Getting a message across has two stages: The Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answers stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.
Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To
get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others down’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll need to communicate as if your audience were you.
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There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amout of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It’s easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without ever taking a class in communication. College professors take dozens of courses in their areas of expertise but none on how to teach. A lot of engineers would scoff at a training program about Telling Others.
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For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience:
1. Pay attention UNEXPECTED
2. Understand and remember it CONCRETE
3. Agree/Believe CREDIBLE
4. Care EMOTIONAL
5. Be able to act on it STORY
Highlight (yellow) – Section Making an Idea Stick: The Communication Framework > page 246
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We’ve seen ideas related to newspapers, accounting, nuclear war, evangelism, seat belts, dust, dancing, litter, football, AIDS, shipping, and hamburgers.
And what we’ve seen is that all these ideas–profound and mundane, serious and silly–share common traits. […] They laughed when you
shared a story instead of a statistic. But when the idea stuck…
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All they had were ideas.
And that’s the great thing about the world of ideas–any of us, with the right insight and the right message, can make an idea stick.
Highlight (yellow) – Section John F. Kennedy versus Floyd Lee > page 250
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Guide to highlight colors
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word Green–Reference to read Blue–Interesting Quote Gray–Typography Problem Red–Example to work through
“It is said that during their training, the Druids learn by heart a great many verses, so many that some people spend 20 years studying the doctrine. The do not think it right to commit their teachings to writing. I suppose this practice began originally for two reasons: they did not want their doctrines to be accessible to the ordinary people, and they did not want their pupils to rely on the written word and so neglect to train their memories.”
–Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico 6.14
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An interesting statement about memory and cultural traditions. Added on Monday, January 1, 2018 night
There is something about committing mythic–or any other–stories to physical form that changes them, because such an act codifies them, freezes-frames them and renders them less organic.
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… the San of southern Africa and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to name just two, chose and still choose to commit their myths to rock-art. Change still occurs, for it is possible to paint over previous art and to add picture-panels.
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Shape-shifters are common protagonists in Celtic myths.
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Another striking custom in the Welsh stories in the way that tenses change, in order to enhance dramatic effect.
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For it usually does happen that if people have the help of written documents, they do not pay as much attention to learning by heart, and so let their memories become less efficient.
Highlight (yellow) – 2. Myth Spinners > The Druids and Oral Tradition > Page 40
Another snippet on memory Added on Monday, January 1, 2018 night
Late Iron Age bronze figurine of a man holding an egg-like object, perhaps a Druid’s egg, an opject used in prophecy, from Neuvy-en-Suillias, in France.
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Or an early rugby ball? Added on Monday, January 1, 2018 night
Indeed, it was not until the 17th century, under the relentless onslaught of the English government against the old Irish order and the filidh [teachers, kingly advisers, poets, satirists, and keepers of tradition] disappeared.
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The Welsh and Irish stories are very different from each other both in content and in timbre. […] It is highly likely that storytellers travelled freely between the courts of Ireland and Wales, and the sharing of storylines between the two countries is not hard to explain.
Highlight (yellow) – 2. Myth Spinners > Page 57
Added on Monday, January 1, 2018 night
Guide to highlight colors
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word Green–Reference to read Blue–Interesting Quote Gray–Typography Problem Red–Example to work through
The ability of humans to accumulate knowledge and information across generations is a defining feature of our species. This ability depends on factors that range from the psychological biases that predispose us to learn from skillful, accomplished, and prestigious people, to the development of technologies for recording and communicating information: from clay tablets to the Internet. In this paper we present empirical evidence documenting how communication technologies have shaped human collective memory. We show that changes in communication technologies, including the introduction of printing and the maturity of shorter forms of printed media, such as newspapers, journals, and pamphlets, were accompanied by sharp changes (or breaks) in the per-capita number of memorable biographies from a time period that are present in current online and offline sources. Moreover, we find that changes in technology, such as the introduction of printing, film, radio, and television, coincide with sharp shifts in the occupations of the individuals present in these biographical records. These two empirical facts provide evidence in support of theories arguing that human collective memory is shaped by the technologies we use to record and communicate information.
Overall, I was fairly impressed with his layout and positive teaching style, though I don’t particularly need some of the treacly motivation that he provided and which is primarily aimed at the complete novice. While I appreciate that for some, hearing this material may be the most beneficial, I would have preferred to have some of it presented visually. In general, I wouldn’t recommend this as a something to listen to on a commute as he frequently admonishes against doing some of the exercises he outlines while driving or operating heavy machinery.
Given the prevalence of and growth of memory systems from the mid-20th century onwards, I personally find it difficult to believe all of his personal story about “rediscovering” many of the memory methods he outlines, or at least to the extent to which he tempts the reader to believe.
Differences from Other Systems
Based on past experience, I really appreciate his methods for better remembering names with faces as his conceptualizations for doing this seemed better to me than the methods outlined by Bruno Furst. I do however, much prefer the major mnemonic system’s method for numbers over the Dominic system for it’s more logical and complete conversion of consonant sounds for most languages. The links between the letters and numbers in the major system are also much easier to remember and don’t require as much work to remember them. I also appreciate the major system for its deeper historical roots as well as for its precise overlap with the Gregg Shorthand method. The poorer structure of the Dominic system is the only evidence I can find to indicate that he seems to have separately re-discovered some of his memory methods.
I appreciated that most of his focus was on practical tasks like to do lists, personal appointments, names and faces, but wish he’d spent some additional time walking through general knowledge examples like he did for the list of the world’s oceans and seas.
While I appreciated his outlining the ability to calculate what day of the week any particular date falls on (something that most memory books don’t touch upon), he failed to completely specify the entire method. He also used a somewhat non-standard method for coding both the days of the week and the months of the year, though mathematically all of these systems are equivalent. I did appreciate his trying to encode a set up for individual years, which will certainly help many cut down on the mental mathematics, particularly as it relates to the dread many have for long division. Unfortunately, he didn’t go far enough and this is where he also failed to finish supplying the full details for all of the special cases for the years. He also failed to mention the discontinuities with the Gregorian versus the Julian calendar making his method more historically universal. For those interested, Wikipedia outlines some of the more familiar mathematical methods for determining the day of the week that a particular date would fall on.
Instead of having spent the time outlining the calendar, which is inherently difficult to do in audio format compared to printed format, he may have been better off having spent the time going into more depth memorizing poetry or prose as an extension of his small aside on memorizing quotes and presenting speeches.
I could have done without the bulk of the final disk which comprised mostly of tests for the material previously presented. The complete beginner may get more out of these exercises however. The final portion of the disk was more interesting as he did provide some philosophy on how memory systems engage both lobes of the brain within the right-brained/left-brained conceptualizations from neuropsychology.
While O’Brien doesn’t completely draw out his entire system, to many this may be a strong benefit as it forces individuals to create their own system within his framework. This is bound to help many to create stronger personalized links between their numbers and their images. The drawback the beginner may find for this is that they may find themselves ever tinkering with their own customized system, or even more likely rebuilding things from scratch when they discover the list of online resources from others that rely on people having a more standardized system.
O’Brien also provides more emphasis on creativity and visualization than some books, which will be very beneficial to many beginners.
Overall, while I’d generally recommend this to the average mnemonist, I’d recommend they approach it after having delved in a bit and learned the major system from somewhere else.
I’ve long been a student of the humanities (and particularly the classics) and have recently begun reviewing over my very old and decrepit knowledge of Latin. It’s been two decades since I made a significant study of classical languages, and lately (as the result of conversations with friends like Dave Harris, Jim Houser, Larry Richardson, and John Kountouris) I’ve been drawn to reviewing them for reading a variety of classical texts in their original languages. Fortunately, in the intervening years, quite a lot has changed in the tools relating to pedagogy for language acquisition.
A copy of Jenny’s Latin text which I had used 20 years ago and recently acquired a new copy for the pittance of $3.25.
Internet
The biggest change in the intervening time is the spread of the internet which supplies a broad variety of related websites with not only interesting resources for things like basic reading and writing, but even audio sources apparently including listening to the nightly news in Latin. There are a variety of blogs on Latin as well as even online courseware, podcasts, pronunciation recordings, and even free textbooks. I’ve written briefly about the RapGenius platform before, but I feel compelled to mention it as a potentially powerful resource as well. (Julius Caesar, Seneca, Ovid, Cicero, et al.) There is a paucity of these sources in a general sense in comparison with other modern languages, but given the size of the niche, there is quite a lot out there, and certainly a mountain in comparison to what existed only twenty years ago.
Software
There has also been a spread of pedagogic aids like flashcard software including Anki and Mnemosyne with desktop, web-based, and even mobile-based versions making learning available in almost any situation. The psychology and learning research behind these types of technologies has really come a long way toward assisting students to best make use of their time in learning and retaining what they’ve learned in long term memory. Simple mobile applications like Duolingo exist for a variety of languages – though one doesn’t currently exist for classical Latin (yet).
Digital Humanities
The other great change is the advancement of the digital humanities which allows for a lot of interesting applications of knowledge acquisition. One particular one that I ran across this week was the Dickinson College Commentaries (DCC). Specifically a handful of scholars have compiled and documented a list of the most common core vocabulary words in Latin (and in Greek) based on their frequency of appearance in extant works. This very specific data is of interest to me in relation to my work in information theory, but it also becomes a tremendously handy tool when attempting to learn and master a language. It is a truly impressive fact that, simply by knowing that if one can memorize and master about 250 words in Latin, it will allow them to read and understand 50% of most written Latin. Further, knowledge of 1,500 Latin words will put one at the 80% level of vocabulary mastery for most texts. Mastering even a very small list of vocabulary allows one to read a large variety of texts very comfortably. I can only think about the old concept of a concordance (which was generally limited to heavily studied texts like the Bible or possibly Shakespeare) which has now been put on some serious steroids for entire cultures. Another half step and one arrives at the Google Ngram Viewer.
The best part is that one can, with very little technical knowledge, easily download the DCC Core Latin Vocabulary (itself a huge research undertaking) and upload and share it through the Anki platform, for example, to benefit a fairly large community of other scholars, learners, and teachers. With a variety of easy-to-use tools, shortly it may be even that much easier to learn a language like Latin – potentially to the point that it is no longer a dead language. For those interested, you can find my version of the shared DCC Core Latin Vocabulary for Anki online; the DCC’s Chris Francese has posted details and a version for Mnemosyne already.
[Editor’s note: Anki’s web service occasionally clears decks of cards from their servers, so if you find that the Anki link to the DCC Core Latin is not working, please leave a comment below, and we’ll re-upload the deck for shared use.]
What tools and tricks do you use for language study and pedagogy?
This series of 12 audio lectures is an excellent little overview of Augustine, his life, times, and philosophy. Most of the series focuses on his writings and philosophy as well as their evolution over time, often with discussion of the historical context in which they were created as well as some useful comparing/contrasting to extant philosophies of the day (and particularly Platonism.)
Early in the series there were some interesting and important re-definitions of some contemporary words. Cary pushes them back to an earlier time with slightly different meanings compared to their modern ones which certainly helps to frame the overarching philosophy presented. Without a close study of this vocabulary, many modern readers will become lost or certainly misdirected when reading modern translations. As examples, words like perverse, righteousness, and justice (or more specifically their Latin counterparts) have subtly different meanings in the late Roman empire than they do today, even in modern day religious settings.
My favorite part, however, has to have been the examples discussing mathematics as an extended metaphor for God and divinity to help to clarify some of Augustine’s thought. These were not only very useful, but very entertaining to me.
As an aside for those interested in mnemotechnic tradition, I’ll also mention that I’ve (re)discovered (see the reference to the Tell paper below) an excellent reference to the modern day “memory palace” (referenced most recently in the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything) squirreled away in Book X of Confessions where Augustine discusses memory as:
“fields and spacious palaces” “…where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or any other way varying those things which the sense hath come to; and whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried.”
Those interested in memes and the history of “memoria ex locis” (of which I don’t even find a reference explicitly written in the original Rhetorica ad Herrenium) would appreciate an additional reference I subsequently found in the opening (and somewhat poetic) paragraph of a paper written by David Tell on JSTOR. The earliest specific reference to a “memory palace” I’m aware of is Matteo Ricci’s in the 16th century, but certainly other references to the construct may have come earlier. Given that Ricci was a Jesuit priest, it’s nearly certain that he would have been familiar with Augustine’s writings at the time, and it’s possible that his modification of Augustine’s mention brought the concept into its current use. Many will know memory as one of the major underpinnings of rhetoric (of which Augustine was a diligent student) as part of the original trivium.
Some may shy away from Augustine because of the religious overtones which go along with his work, but though there were occasional “preachy sounding” sections in the material, they were present only to clarify the philosophy.
I’d certainly recommend this series of lectures to anyone not closely familiar with Augustine’s work as it has had a profound and continuing affect on Western philosophy, thought, and politics.
Late Iron Age bronze figurine of a man holding an egg-like object, perhaps a Druid’s egg, an opject used in prophecy, from Neuvy-en-Suillias, in France.
Augustine: Philosopher and Saint byProfessor Phillip Cary, Ph.D., Eastern University (The Learning Company, 1997)