pre-chemistry

Alchemy: The Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense - Rory Sutherland

Partial excerpts (antilibrary)

Rory’s Rules of Alchemy

Rory’s Rules of Alchemy
The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
Don’t design for average.
It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical.
The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience

Prologue: Challenging Coca-Cola

Prologue: Challenging Coca-Cola

What I’m fairly sure nobody would say is this: ‘Hey, let’s try marketing a really expensive drink, that comes in a tiny can . . . and that tastes kind of disgusting.’ Yet that is exactly what one company did. And by doing so they launched a soft drinks brand that would indeed go on to be a worthy rival to Coca-Cola: that drink was Red Bull.

The Case for Magic

The Case for Magic

Unfortunately, because reductionist logic has proved so reliable in the physical sciences, we now believe it must be applicable everywhere – even in the much messier field of human affairs

the economy is not a machine – it is a highly complex system. Machines don’t allow for magic, but complex systems do

Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience

All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked. And all of them, apart from the first, were produced by a division of my advertising agency, Ogilvy, which I founded to look for counter-intuitive solutions to problems

magic should have a place in our lives – it is never too late to discover your inner alchemist

Introduction: Cracking the (Human) Code

Introduction: Cracking the (Human) Code

To a logical person, there would have been no point in testing three of these variables, but they are the three that actually work. This is an important metaphor for the contents of this book: if we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things. But in real life, most things aren’t logical – they are psycho-logical

There are often two reasons behind people’s behaviour: the ostensibly logical reason, and the real reason

Introducing Psycho-Logic

Introducing Psycho-Logic

This book is intended as a provocation, and is only accidentally a work of philosophy

My word to describe the way we make decisions – to distinguish it from the artificial concepts of ‘logic’ and ‘rationality’ – is ‘psycho-logic’

Rather than being designed to be optimal, it has evolved to be useful.

Robert Zion, the social psychologist, once described cognitive psychology as ‘social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero

The alchemy of this book’s title is the science of knowing what economists are wrong about

Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense. The top-right section of this graph is populated with the very real and significant advances made in pure science, where achievements can be made by improving on human perception and psychology. In the other quadrants, ‘wonky’ human perception and emotionality are integral to any workable solution

Some Things Are Dishwasher-Proof, Others Are Reason-Proof

Some Things Are Dishwasher-Proof, Others Are Reason-Proof

if you expose every one of the world’s problems to ostensibly logical solutions, those that can easily be solved by logic will rapidly disappear, and all that will be left are the ones that are logic-proof – those where, for whatever reason, the logical answer does not work. Most political, business, foreign policy and, I strongly suspect, marital problems seem to be of this type

I don’t want a conceptual artist in charge of air-traffic control, for instance. However, we now unfortunately fetishise logic to such an extent that we are increasingly blind to its failings

For instance, the victorious Brexit campaign in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States have both been routinely blamed on the clueless and emotional behaviour of undereducated voters, but you could make equally strong cases that the Remain campaign in Britain and Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the American presidency failed because of the clueless, hyper-rational behaviour of overeducated advisors, who threw away huge natural advantages

the Clinton campaign was dominated by a strategist called Robby Mook, who had become so enamoured of data and mathematical modelling that he refused to use anything else

To solve logic-proof problems requires intelligent, logical people to admit the possibility that they might be wrong about something, but these people’s minds are often most resistant to change – perhaps because their status is deeply entwined with their capacity for reason. Highly educated people don’t merely use logic; it is part of their identity

for all the man’s faults, I think Donald Trump can solve many problems that the more rational Hillary Clinton simply wouldn’t have been able to address

he may not need to build the wall to achieve his trade ambitions – he just needs people to believe that he might. Similarly, he doesn’t need to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement – he just needs to raise it as a possibility. Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing

Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works

Crime, Fiction and Post-Rationalism: Or Why Reality Isn’t Nearly as Logical as We Think

Crime, Fiction and Post-Rationalism: Or Why Reality Isn’t Nearly as Logical as We Think

Think of life as like a criminal investigation: a beautifully linear and logical narrative when viewed in retrospect, but a fiendishly random, messy and wasteful process when experienced in real time.

the single worst thing that can happen in a criminal investigation is for everyone involved to become fixated on the same theory, because one false assumption shared by everyone can undermine the entire investigation. There’s a name for this – it’s called ‘privileging the hypothesis’.

the theory of an inside job staged to look like a botched burglary was so doggedly held that all subsequent contradictory evidence was either suppressed or not shared with the press

In a designed system, such as a machine, one thing does serve one narrow purpose, but in an evolved or complex system, or in human behaviour, things can have multiple uses depending on the context within which they are viewed.

It is not appropriate to bring the same habits of thought that we use to deal with things that have been consciously designed to understanding complex and evolved systems, with second-order considerations

The Danger of Technocratic Elites

If you are a technocrat, you’ll generally have achieved your status by explaining things in reverse; the plausible post-rationalisation is the stock-in-trade of the commentariat. Unfortunately, it is difficult for such people to avoid the trap of assuming that the same skills that can explain the past can be used to predict the future

The same is true of scientific progress

does not mean that science should progress according to neat, linear and sequential rules

There are two separate forms of scientific enquiry – the discovery of what works and the explanation and understanding of why it works. These are two entirely different things, and can happen in either order

Evolution, too, is a haphazard process that discovers what can survive

it doesn’t care a damn about reasons

Perhaps a plausible ‘why’ should not be a pre-requisite in deciding a ‘what’, and the things we try should not be confined to those things whose future success we can most easily explain in retrospect

The record of science in some ways casts doubt on a scientific approach to problem solving

On Nonsense and Non-Sense

One customer even turned down an offer of a £200 refund on their bill, saying, ‘No, I’d rather have a penguin.’

it sounds like nonsense. It isn’t, though. It’s a different kind of thing, which I call ‘non-sense’.

in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.

strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should

Behavioural economics might well be described as the study of the nonsensical and the non-sensical aspects of human behaviour

viewed through the lens of

Page 20 evolutionary psychology, the effectiveness of cute animals in advertising should not shock us. Advertising exists to be noticed, and we have evolved, surely, to pay attention to living things

And sometimes behaviour is non-sensical because evolution is just smarter than we are. Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.

for a long time the human appendix was thought to be nonsense, a vestigial

in 2007, William Parker, Randy Bollinger and their colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina hypothesised that the appendix actually serves as a haven for bacteria in the digestive system that are valuable both in aiding digestion and in providing immunity from disease

the single greatest strength of free markets is their ability to generate innovative things whose popularity makes no sense

This is a book written in defence of things that don’t quite make sense, but it is also a book that – conversely – attacks our fetishisation of things that do.

it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.