Top 20 Ideas: 200th Newsletter Special 🎉
My Top 20 Ideas from newsletters 100 to 199
Whoohoo, we’re at 200 newsletters! 🎉 That’s almost 600 interesting ideas on critical thinking, philosophy and decision-making. Thank you all for reading and liking the posts and for your feedback and shares. They all mean a lot to me.
1. Provocative Rider
The Provocative Rider is a questioning technique designed to annoy or intimidate. It consists of an innocent question followed by a provocative statement or question. As in:
How did you get home last night? Probably in handcuffs in the back of a police car.
Who writes your newsletters? A 3-year-old who’s had too much sugar?
Getting a proper answer to the provocation is not the point, though. Rather, the purpose is to gain control over a conversation. By throwing the interviewee off balance and observing their reaction.
Source: changingminds.org
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Asking Provocative Questions
2. Red Team Analysis
Red Team Analysis is an analytical technique designed to reproduce the thoughts and actions of a counterpart. It’s often used in intelligence analysis circles to anticipate the moves of an adversary such as a foreign power. The bare-bones approach is to:
Put a team of knowledgeable analysts in the shoes of the adversary. Then present them with prompts to which they have to react as the adversary would.
Instruct the team to develop a set of questions from the counterpart’s point of view, such as: How would I react? What would be my concerns? Who would I trust with the information?
Draft policy papers from the perspective of the adversary. These can include analysis and recommendations on strategic decisions.
Red Team Analysis is akin to an elaborate role-play. Participants should be intimately familiar with the target’s culture and way of thinking. But as with all predictions, the method is far from being infallible.
Source: Tradecraft Primer
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Thinking Like The Enemy
3. Strategic Approximation
Stop looking for the perfect decision. Management consultant Peter F. Drucker explains why:
There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation — and a risk.
—Peter F. Drucker
Decisions almost always have unintended consequences, which I wrote about in an essay about all the things that could possibly go wrong.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Achieving Perfection
4. Othello Error
Desdemona cheated on Othello. Or so the general of the Venetian army thought. When Othello confronts Desdemona in Shakespeare’s tragic play, she denies having been unfaithful and cries. Tragically, her jealous husband takes her reaction as evidence of her guilt and kills her.
When making the Othello Error, we fixate on the pre-conceived notion that someone is lying and ignore any signs of truth telling. The term was coined by Paul Ekman in his 1985 book Telling Lies. He notes that “simply observing an emotion does not tell you what caused that emotion”.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Lying
5. Limited Hangout
A Limited Hangout is a sneaky communication tactic that’s used when a secret can no longer be held as a secret. The idea is to reveal only part of the truth or selected information to divert attention from more damaging or sensitive facts.
Imagine your kids had a secret house party while you were away on holiday. You notice your strategic whiskey reserves are running dangerously low. And you can’t recall having depleted them yourself. The truth is about to come out, so your kids decide to let parts of the truth “hang out”, so to speak. They admit to having had people over for a civilised whiskey tasting. All while hoping you won’t probe further.
To the surprise of no one, the term originated with spies and politicians trying to keep as much unfavourable information away from the public as possible.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Truth and Half-Truths
6. The Chris Discount
Don’t you hate it if a salesperson keeps using your name to build rapport? The Chris Discount is based on the reverse idea. Use your own name to introduce and humanise yourself in a light-hearted way. Like in this anecdote by negotiation expert Chris Voss:
I was in an outlet mall […] and picked out some shirts in one of the stores. At the front counter the young lady asked me if I wanted to join their frequent buyer program.
I asked her if I got a discount for joining and she said, “No.”
So I decided to try another angle. I said in a friendly manner, “My name is Chris. What’s the Chris Discount?”
She looked from the register, met my eyes, and gave a little laugh.
“I’ll have to ask my manager, Kathy,” and turned to the woman standing next to her.
Kathy, who’d heard the whole exchange, said, “The best I can do is ten percent.”
—Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Persuasion
7. Fisher Protocol
What would it feel like to greenlight a nuclear strike? The decision to kill millions of innocent people should not be taken lightly. The emphasis here is on should. Because leaders can be surprisingly detached from the consequences of their decisions. In 1981, Harvard Law School professor and negotiation expert Roger Fisher addressed this problem in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
The Fisher Protocol suggested implanting the nuclear codes inside the body of a volunteer accompanying the President. To get to the codes and launch a strike, the President would be forced to confront the reality of death. How? By taking the volunteer’s standard-issue butcher knife and cutting the codes out of his aide.
To learn more about this unusual solution, including what Fisher’s friends at the Pentagon had to say about his idea, check out my latest essay The Fisher Protocol: How to Prevent Disastrous Decisions.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Not-So-Strong Leadership
8. Schelling Point
How do you cooperate if you cannot communicate? According to the game theory concept known as Schelling Point, you rely on social norms.
Suppose I want to meet with you, but I don’t tell you where or when to meet. You also want to meet with me, but we can’t communicate. That sounds like an impossible problem to solve — we can’t do it. But not quite.
You can use social norms to converge on a Schelling point. I know you’re rational and educated. And you know I’m rational and educated. We’re both going to start thinking.
When will we meet? If we have to pick an arbitrary date, we’ll probably pick New Year’s Eve. What time will we meet? Midnight or 12:01 a.m. Where will we meet? If we’re Americans, the big meeting spot is probably New York City, the most important city. Where in New York City will we meet? Probably under the clock at Grand Central Station.
In Berlin, Germany, I’d go for the World Clock at Alexanderplatz as a meeting point. In Melbourne, Australia, the old post office at Bourke Street Mall seems to be the best option. What’s the most likely meeting spot where you live?
👉 From: 3 ideas in 2 Minutes on Action and Inaction
9. G.I. Joe Fallacy
Every episode of the animated series G.I. Joe famously ended with a public service announcement for the kids. Tell the truth! Listen to your friends! Don’t step on frozen lakes! The kids in the series thanked the protagonists with a catchphrase: “Now we know.” But is that enough?
The G.I. Joe Fallacy is a reminder that merely knowing about a fallacy or bias is not enough to overcome it. According to researchers from Harvard and Yale, some biases are too “encapsulated”. For example, the Halo Effect (when positive impressions of someone influence our judgment about them in other areas) could not be averted by mere cognition. Then there’s the general problem of distraction while we’re in the heat of an emotional decision-making moment.
This isn’t to blame G.I. Joe, though. He knew better: “Knowing is half the battle”, was the real sign-off.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Fateful Fallacies
10. How Zen Traps You
Getting ourselves out of a moral conundrum requires us to spot it in the first place. Philosopher Alan Watts explains how Zen teachers help their students by trapping them in dilemmas:
It’s just like someone being put in a squirrel cage, or set to chasing his own tail, or trying to catch his own shadow. But under the supervision of a teacher who knows exactly what’s going on. The teacher himself has been through it. And he’s not like the other kind of teacher who is still a student and is urging his students to keep on the rat race because he’s still on it.
Finally it dawns. You see, when you persistently do something absurd, eventually you’ll have to see it. As [William] Blake said, ‘The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.’
But if you’re really consistent about it, if you really go for that foolishness. Then you’ll suddenly realise that you have made yourself absolutely absurd. Then there is nothing to do but laugh.
―Alan Watts
According to Alan Watts, the way of Zen is to confront students with paradoxical situations and impossible problems. Eventually, they will see through the futility of it all.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Moral Conundrums
11. Orwell's Writing Rules
Orwell's Writing Rules are a set of guidelines on how to write with clarity. They originated from an essay by George Orwell in which he criticised politicians and bureaucrats for employing language to obfuscate and manipulate. The novelist recommended six rules to keep yourself from writing meaningless technocratic drivel:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
I broke the guidelines down further in my essay on Orwell’s Writing Rules: How to Write With Clarity.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Writing Truthfully
12. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy
As you may have noticed, I’m fascinated by the absurdity of the modern workplace. With Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle describes why bureaucracies in particular are so prone to mismanagement.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
In case you missed it, I wrote a whole essay about Pournelle’s law and government dysfunction, applying it to the hilarious Australian political satire Utopia, aka Dreamland.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Misguided Management
13. Writing Music
Discovering new ideas through writing is only the beginning. You may also want to present your words in a way that people enjoy reading them. American writer Gary Provost illustrates how:
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals — sounds that say, listen to this; it is important.
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
—Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on the Art of Writing
14. Falsification Ratio
The game of kings teaches many lessons to the intrepid thinker and decision-maker. Here’s one writer Nabeel S. Qureshi highlighted on his Substack: the Falsification Ratio.
The lesson I found the most striking is this: there’s a direct correlation between how skilled you are as a chess player, and how much time you spend falsifying your ideas. The authors find that grandmasters spend longer falsifying their idea for a move than they do coming up with the move in the first place, whereas amateur players tend to identify a solution and then play it shortly after without trying their hardest to falsify it first. (Often amateurs, find reasons for playing the move — ‘hope chess’.)
Call this the ‘falsification ratio’: the ratio of time you spend trying to falsify your idea to the time you took coming up with it in the first place. For grandmasters, this is 4:1 — they’ll spend 1 minute finding the right move, and another 4 minutes trying to falsify it, whereas for amateurs this is something like 0.5:1 — 1 minute finding the move, 30 seconds making a cursory effort to falsify it.—Nabeel S. Qureshi, Notes on Puzzles
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Making Tough Decisions
15. Booth's Rule #2
Booth's Rule #2 is named after legendary skydiving equipment pioneer Bill Booth. He’s credited for making skydiving a whole lot safer…but doesn’t seem too optimistic about the positive effect this had:
The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant.
—Bill Booth (allegedly)
It’s counterintuitive. But safety measures can indeed have unintended consequences, also known as the Peltzman Effect. If a sport becomes safer, let’s say by mandating helmets, people will be more comfortable taking risks, which leads to more injuries. At best.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Avoiding Disaster
16. Learning to Be Silent
Silence is a skill that has to be learned. This is wittily illustrated with the following Zen story taken from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps.
The pupils of the Tendai school used to study meditation before Zen entered Japan. Four of them who were intimate friends promised one another to observe seven days of silence.
On the first day all were silent. Their meditation had begun auspiciously, but when night came and the oil lamps were growing dim one of the pupils could not help exclaiming to a servant: “Fix those lamps.”
The second pupil was surprised to hear the first one talk. “We are not supposed to say a word,” he remarked.
“You two are stupid. Why did you talk?” asked the third.
“I am the only one who has not talked,” concluded the fourth pupil.
This story is from my article 5 Zen Stories Worth Contemplating for Years (Or Not at All).
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on the Power of Silence
17. Preference Falsification
Personally, I enjoy workplace socialisation very much. There’s nothing better than hanging out with all your coworkers for a drink or five after you’ve spent the whole day with them in the office. It’s the single best thing since LinkedIn.
On an entirely unrelated note, let’s talk about Preference Falsification. This phenomenon occurs when we express opinions or beliefs that differ from our true preferences to conform to social norms, avoid conflict or gain acceptance. We hide our true beliefs in favour of what is perceived as socially acceptable or desirable.
People may publicly endorse ideas or behaviours they secretly despise, either because they fear social repercussions or because they believe their true preferences are in the minority. In other words, we lie about what we like. The concept is similar to the Abilene Paradox, which happens when a group acts against its members‘ preferences even though everyone secretly agrees on how wrong a decision is.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Handling the Truth
18. Roger’s Rule
What a tired trope it is to tell people to learn from their mistakes. Roger’s Rule is a perspective from which you probably haven’t looked at it yet:
In tennis, perfection is impossible. In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for you. What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%. In other words, even top ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.
When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. […]
So here’s why I’m telling you this. When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world and it is. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you. This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point and the next point after that with intensity, clarity, and focus. The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes, you’re going to lose a point, a match, a season, a job.
—Roger Federer, 2024 Commencement Address at Dartmouth
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Screwing Up
19. Mutually Assured Distraction
Mutually Assured Distraction is a social trap coined by writer Gurwinder Bhogal. Here he applies it to captivating yet pointless battles on social media:
On X, meanwhile, there is a self-propagating system known as “the culture war”. This game consists of trying to score points (likes and retweets) by attacking the enemy political tribe. Unlike in a regular war, the combatants can’t kill each other, only make each other angrier, so little is ever achieved, except that all players become stressed by constant bickering. And yet they persist in bickering, if only because their opponents do, in an endless state of mutually assured distraction.
—Gurwinder Bhogal, Why Everything is Becoming a Game
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Being Distracted
20. Self-Demonstrating Article
A Self-Demonstrating Article is an article that, through its own structure or content, demonstrates the very concept it explains. It serves as both an explanation and an example of its subject matter. The beauty of a self-demonstrating article lies in its ability to illustrate its points through its own structure, content and purpose.
Think of Gary Provost’s rather rhythmic article in which he demonstrates how to write with rhythm. To create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. To not just write words. To write music.
Or take what you’re reading right now, a self-demonstrating article about self-demonstrating articles. It not only defines the concept but also showcases it by being an example itself. By reading this, you are experiencing the explanation in real time.
👉 From: 3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Autoreflection
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On to the next 100 newsletters!
Chris
themindcollection.com