Social Science & Business

Question 1

According to Jamil Zaki, what are the 3 components of empathy? How can they lead to burnout?

Answer 1

Feeling, understanding, and acting. If you feel and understand but can’t act, you get burned out.

Question 2

What are the 4 concepts of Ikigai?

Answer 2

What I enjoy, what I’m good at, What others need, and what I can get paid for

Question 3

What is the Pygmalion effect?

Answer 3

When a teacher is told that certain students are smarter, those students do better. This is probably due to more attention and enthusiasm to teaching these students

Question 4

According to Dan Pink, what are the 3 aspects of Motivation 2.0?

Answer 4

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

Question 5

According to Bill Burnett, what are the 3 results of work?

Answer 5

Money, Impact, and Expression

Question 6

According to Jane McGonigal, what are the 4 aspects of a game?

Answer 6

Goal, Rules, Feedback system, and Voluntary participation

Question 7

What is Daniel Dennett’s 3 step jootsing process to creativity?

Answer 7

1. Go deep in a system to understand it and its rules
2. Go outside of the system and find something surprising that subverts its rules
3. Use both of those to come up with something new and creative.

Question 8

According to Taleb, what is a test for being antifragile?

Answer 8

Antifragile things have more upside than downside to random events or certain shocks

Question 9

What is Taleb’s chief ethical rule?

Answer 9

Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

You must have skin in the game.

Question 10

What 3 mythological metaphors does Taleb use for fragility, robustness, and antifragility?

Answer 10

Damocles, the Phoenix, and the hydra

Question 11

According to Taleb, how is overcompensation a type of redundancy?

Answer 11

Overcompensation adds extra resources in anticipation of even greater stressors, which is redundancy. For example, becoming immune to poison in small steps.

Question 12

According to Taleb, how is an artist antifragile in a way that a mid level banker is not?

Answer 12

“There’s no such thing as bad press.” Outrageous actions and critique only draw attention and strengthen reputation whereas the banker would get fired and lose everything.

Question 13

According to Taleb, how is the startup ecosystem antifragile at a macro level?

Answer 13

Individual startups need to fail and confer the lessons to others. Same goes for a competitive local restaurant scene.

Question 14

According to Taleb, how are nation states and Switzerland an example of mediocristan?

Answer 14

Switzerland doesn’t have a strong central government, so squabbles happen largely at a local level. This local volatility creates long-term stability

Question 15

According to Taleb, how are forest fires an example of suppressed volatility? What’s the cost?

Answer 15

In the short-term, there’s more apparent stability. Long-term, it builds into black swan events far more destructive than natural volatility

Question 16

According to Taleb, how are the taxi driver and the banker examples of different levels of volatility?

Answer 16

The taxi driver has day-to-day volatility in his fares, but at least the risk is visible. The banker has day-to-day stability until he gets fired

Question 17

According to Taleb, what is iatrogenic? How does it apply to medicine and elsewhere?

Answer 17

The damage from treatment is worse than the benefit. For example, George Washington being bled to death. Also very common in socioeconomic settings that are complex ecosystems that cannot easily be disturbed. For example, suppressing forest fires, city planning, overparenting

Question 18

According to Taleb, what is a barbell strategy? What are examples?

Answer 18

To achieve antifragility, combine extreme stability with extreme volatility to minimize downside while getting exposure to upside. Better to be aggressive and paranoid than cautiously optimistic.

For example, writers take a boring day job and write at night. Protect the weaker class, let the stronger class do their job, and don’t worry about the middle class.

Question 19

According to Taleb, how did Seneca exhibit antifragility?

Answer 19

With Stoicism, he conditioned himself to always expect the worst e.g. traveling with nothing. He also maintained upside in his wealth

Question 20

According to Taleb, what are Fat Tony’s two rules to get skin in the game?

Answer 20

1. Never get on a plane if the pilot is not onboard
2. Make sure there is a copilot

Question 21

According to Taleb, how can you apply “less is more” to forecasting?

Answer 21

More data tends to make our analysis more fragile since we are blind to black swans anyways. Instead, rely on simpler heuristics and singular reasons

Question 22

According to Julian Shapiro what 3 things help storytelling?

Answer 22

1. Create suspense with hooks and cliffhangers
2. Relive the emotions by blowing your own mind
3. Vary your speed and volume especially with pauses

Question 23

According to Taleb, how is fragility concave? What’s an example?

Answer 23

As the intensity of the shock goes up the harm grows even faster. For example, falling damage

Question 24

According to Taleb, what should we think of instead of probabilities?

Answer 24

Payoffs. Probabilities or true/false don’t consider the net effect

Question 25

According to Taleb, how do options create antifragility?

Answer 25

Options allow you to take the (unlimited) upside when available but with limited downside.

Question 26

According to Taleb, how does scientific progress misrepresent technological and practical progress?

Answer 26

Progress usually starts with trial and error in practice then we derive theories from that. However, we often think of basic research in the other direction having motivated the change

Question 27

According to Taleb, what is the planning fallacy, why is it new, and how are projects subject to nonlinearities?

Answer 27

Projects usually take longer and rarely less time. It is new because of a more complex economy that introduce nonlinearities.

Question 28

According to Taleb, what is the Ludic Fallacy?

Answer 28

Mistaking the well-posed problems of math and lab experiments for the ecologically complex real world. Includes mistaking the randomness in casinos for that in real life

Question 29

According to Taleb, what is a turkey?

Answer 29

The turkey who is fed every day by the butcher and is more and more confident that the butcher “will never hurt” until Thanksgiving

Question 30

According to Taleb, what is the Agency Problem? What are 2 examples?

Answer 30

The manager of a business is not the true owner. Therefore, they become antifragile at the expense of others. For example, fund managers taking management fee and carried interest or politicians/academics providing their opinion

Question 31

According to Taleb, what is Subtractive Knowledge?

Answer 31

You know what is wrong with more certainty than you know anything else. An application of via negativa

Question 32

What is the Lindy Effect? What is an example?

Answer 32

A technology, or the anything nonperishable that increases in life expectancy with every day of its life–unlike perishable goods. For example, a book in print

Question 33

According to Paul Ekman, what are the 6 basic emotions?

Answer 33

Anger, surprise, fear, enjoyment, sadness, disgust

Question 34

According to Laurie Santos, what determines our happiness in what proportion?

Answer 34

50% genetics
10% circumstance (e.g. money, job, possessions)
40% us (e.g. thoughts, actions, attitude)

Question 35

What is hedonic adaptation (or hedonic treadmill)? What is an example?

Answer 35

Observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

As a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.

Question 36

According to Laurie Santos, at what income does more money no longer make us happier?

Answer 36

75K

Question 37

According to Laurie Santos, what 4 things are known to make us happier?

Answer 37

1. Spending time with friends and family
2. Practicing gratitude
3. Practicing optimism
4. Physical activity

Question 38

According to Laurie Santos, how can you use money to make you happier?

Answer 38

Use money to buy time.

Question 39

According to Paul Rozin, what is benign disgust? What are examples? Why?

Answer 39

Things that are pleasurable because they are unpleasant. E.g. horror movies, spicy food, looking at poo

They provide a sense of mastery in a safe setting.

Question 40

According to Alex Murrell, what are 3 ways that mass marketing can be effective and not wasteful compared to targeted advertising?

Answer 40

1. Cultural imprinting - everyone has to know that it’s a luxury brand to justify it for existing owners
2. Subconscious seduction - maybe more effective because we generally do ignore mass marketing
3. Costly signaling - shows the strength of the brand to waste money

Question 41

According to the Art of Manliness, how can one avoid the journaling trap of a black hole of wallowing in unproductive negative emotions?

Answer 41

Instead of asking “why” that leads to self absorbed rumination, ask “what” to get concrete causes and next steps.

Question 42

According to the Microsoft research paper in Nature, what were 3 impacts of firm-wide remote work based on data during COVID?

Answer 42

1. Network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts
2. There was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication.
3. It makes it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.

Question 43

According to Chuck Marohn, what is the problem with post-war development of cities in America?

Answer 43

We built out suburbs with a grand plan and did not let them evolve naturally. This has left us with unsustainable maintenance

Question 44

What is the difference between morals and ethics?

Answer 44

Morals are the internal principles of right and wrong.

Ethics are the rules of behavior within some group

Question 45

What is Dunbar’s number? How did he determine it?

Answer 45

Extrapolating from primate studies to the size of the human brain, Robin Dunbar estimates that we are capable of maintaining roughly 150 social relationships.

Question 46

According to Harari, what capability allowed Homo sapiens to exceed Dunbars number and enable mass cooperation?

Answer 46

The ability to create and believe in fictional stories

Question 47

What is Harari’s test for whether an entity is real or invented?

Answer 47

Ask if it can suffer. A human can suffer, but a nation cannot

Question 48

According to Harari, what is Animism?

Answer 48

The belie that every natural phenomenon is aware, has feelings, and can communicate with humans.

Question 49

According to Harari, how does Animism differ from modern religions in hierarchy and scope?

Answer 49

Animism addresses local, not universal, entities. There is no hierarchy between entities

Question 50

According to Carla Pugh, what’s the difference between how quickly expert and novice surgeons work?

Answer 50

Expert surgeons know when to move slowly and carefully. They take pauses more tactically

Question 51

According to Sam Wineburg’s ~2020 study, how many of 3000 high school students were able to determine that a 2016 election video was fake?

Answer 51

3 or 0.1%

Question 52

According to Sam Wineburg, what’s the difference between how professional fact checkers evaluate news versus stanford students and “other supposedly smart people?”

Answer 52

Fact checkers engage in lateral thinking where they search references and open up lots of tabs to cross reference sources

Question 53

How did Alia Krid’s study with housekeepers evaluate the hypothesis that exercise is a placebo?

Answer 53

They told half of the housekeepers that they were getting the recommended exercise just through work. 4 weeks later with no other changes, they had a decrease in weight, waist to hip ratio, and systolic blood pressure.

Question 54

How did Alia Crum’s 2011 milkshake study go?

Answer 54

She gave the same participants the same shake 4 weeks apart and told them either that it was a diet shake or a calorie bomb. Levels of ghrelin, the hunger stimulating hormone, dropped 3 times faster after the calorie bomb.

Question 55

What are the 4 qualities of successful prisoner’s dilemma programs in Axelrod’s tournament?

Answer 55

1. Nice (started cooperating)
2. Forgiving (didn’t hold a grudge)
3. Retaliatory (hit back immediately). Don’t be a pushover
4. Clear (not so random that others couldn’t figure them out)

Question 56

In Axelrod’s ecological simulation of prisoner’s dilemma strategies, what happened with the island of tit-for-tat within nasty programs? How might we extrapolate from that?

Answer 56

Tit for tat slowly grows and becomes more successful bringing nice strategies to win out in the long run.

This may suggest that cooperation doesn’t require altruism: it’s inherently more effective and will flourish and dominate in the long run.

Question 57

In Axelrod’s prisoner’s dilemma simulation, what strategy won?

Answer 57

Tit for tat

Question 58

In what circumstance does tit for tat for forgiveness help? How is it implemented?

Answer 58

Noise for whether the correct choice was conveyed. Forgiveness is only 90% chance to retaliate