Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“the human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol”

“Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.”

“It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.”

“you are not thinking; you are merely being logical”

“the uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating”

“Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.”

“And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act:”

“It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past. A new campaigning style, a single rogue variable or a ‘black swan’ event can throw the most perfectly calibrated model into chaos.”

“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.”

“it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.”

“when you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic”

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”

“Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.”

“what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal”

“There is an important lesson in evaluating human behaviour: never denigrate a behaviour as irrational until you have considered what purpose it really serves.”

“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. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club. Dare to be trivial. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it.”

“You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame.”

“Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.”

“all big data comes from the same place: the past. Yet a single change in context can change human behaviour significantly.”

“Many pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach.”

“No living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner.”

“Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made.”

“We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.”

“For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.”

“Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational. If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary and jaywalkers will be able to march into the road, forcing the driverless car to stop suddenly, at great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be ‘angry’, and to occasionally maliciously fail to stop in time and strike the pedestrian on the shins.”

“Why are people happy with the idea that nature has an accounting function, but much less comfortable with the idea that it also has a marketing function? Should we despise flowers because they are less efficient than grasses?”

“Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at and be quite good at them.’ Complementary talent is far more valuable than conformist talent.”

“There is a parallel in the behaviour of bees, which do not make the most of the system they have evolved to collect nectar and pollen. Although they have an efficient way of communicating about the direction of reliable food sources, the waggle dance, a significant proportion of the hive seems to ignore it altogether and journeys off at random. In the short term, the hive would be better off if all bees slavishly followed the waggle dance, and for a time this random behaviour baffled scientists, who wondered why 20 million years of bee evolution had not enforced a greater level of behavioural compliance. However, what they discovered was fascinating: without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in what complexity theorists call ‘a local maximum’; they would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death. So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.”

“The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine. I hate to say this, but Rudy was an alchemist. Several experts I have talked to in the high-end wine business regard their own field as essentially a placebo market; one of them admitted that he was relatively uninterested in the products he sold and would sneak off and fetch a beer at premium tastings of burgundies costing thousands of pounds a bottle. Another described himself as ‘the eunuch in the whorehouse’ – someone who was valuable because he was immune to the charms of the product he promoted.”

“This distinction matters a great deal. Unlike short-term expediency, long-term self-interest, as the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has shown, often leads to behaviours that are indistinguishable from mutually beneficial cooperation. The reason the large fish does not eat its cleaner fish is not because of altruism but because over the long-term, the cleaner fish is more valuable to it alive than dead. The cleaner fish in turn could cheat by ignoring the ectoparasites and eating bits of the host fish’s gills instead, but its long-term future is better if the big fish becomes a repeat customer.* What keeps the relationship honest and mutually beneficial is nothing other than the prospect of repetition.”