I’m a total sucker for the Freakanomics\/Malcom Gladwell genre anyway, but this book blew my socks off. It’s not very long and it’s full of the genre’s best features: counter-intuitive research results, sticky anecdotes, a breezy style. But two ideas that I’d heard before were described in such a way that they became striking insights for me: the extent to which I am irrationally loss-averse, and the power of the conflict between the altruistic and pleasure centers in explaining the striking arguments in Punished By Rewards<\/em><\/a>. Knowing about my loss-aversion makes me wonder how to fix it. Coincidentally, I just read something that recommended taking a longer view in investing to avoid loss-aversion-driven selling low. But my problem tends to be more of a buy-and-hold-no-matter-what reaction (more generally than investing). As for the altruism\/pleasure center conflicts, it could be very helpful in library and other non-profit PR in which I have input; ask for your supporters’ help because it will make them feel good, not because they’ll get anything out of it. Since we don’t have any budget for PBS-type incentives, we haven’t often diverged from that principle anyway, but it seems broadly useful. A great book and a quick read – A.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m a total sucker for the Freakanomics\/Malcom Gladwell genre anyway, but this book blew my socks off. It’s not very long and it’s full of the genre’s best features: counter-intuitive research results, sticky anecdotes, a breezy style. But two ideas that I’d heard before were described in such a way that they became striking insights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}