Long before Mr. Ed, the talking horse, Clever Hans was a horse who apparently could understand human language and answer mathematical questions. In the late 1800s, a German high school mathematics instructor named Wilhelm Von Osten believed humans had underestimated animal intelligence and that animals could learn to read or count. Von Osten’s initial attempts…
“I need your help finding a Purple Squirrel.” I was catching up over coffee with a semi-retired friend who sources engineers for startups. Thomas (not his real name) smiled when he realized I had no idea what he was talking about. I had heard of a purple frog, but not a squirrel. As you might…
If you asked 1000 people if they were open or closed-minded, my guess is that more than 90% would claim to be open minded. But are they really open-minded? Nobody wants to admit they are closed-minded. In fact, it likely doesn’t even occur to a closed-minded person that they are closed-minded. This blind spot makes…
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. This colorful phrase, called Hanlon’s Razor, explains that people aren’t always out to get us; sometimes they just make mistakes. It’s a practical application of Occam’s Razor which states that, everything else being equal, the simplest solution is usually the best one. Hanlon’s…
In the climactic scene of the movie A Few Good Men, Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) demands the truth from a testifying Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson). Jack’s response is a cinema classic: You can’t handle the truth! It’s a mesmerizing scene which contains an interesting psychological tidbit. People often rate honesty as the most important value…
When I ask people to name the most revolutionary technology, the most common answers are the Internet and the mobile phone. Both have certainly fundamentally changed our lives and it is difficult to imagine living without either of them. But a case can be made that the telegraph was just as impactful. The telegraph, for…
Many people complain that they get too many emails and there’s even a phenomenon called Inbox Zero. But do we really get that many emails? And do we really want fewer emails? In the book The Tyranny of Email, John Freeman claims the average office worker “sends and receives two hundred emails a day.” According…
I recently took part in an event which the organizers described as happening under the Chatham House Rule. After talking to many of the participants, I realized we were uncertain exactly what this meant. We assumed the rule implied confidentiality – but we disagreed on how much. Most of us were wrong. Founded in 1920,…
Recently a colleague sent me an email which said “since you’re a lexiphile, you might like these phrases and use them in a future blog”. He included a list of 10 punny sentences like this one: Police were called to the daycare center, where a three-year-old was resisting a rest. He was right – I…
You, Sir are living in a historic time. Post-truth politics gets carefully manicured through fake news and propagated bigly via an echo chamber. By my guesstimate, everyone’s favorite bête noire is the overuse of the word ‘disruption’. Am I on fleek? There’s no reason to get your dandruff up. During a town hall meeting, Lake…