I really enjoyed Dan Ariely's last two books, so I decided to read his latest which just recently came out, Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles. This one was a very short, fun read made up of Dan's answers to reader questions in his weekly Wall Street Journal column. It was a good mix of behavioral economics/psychology combined with a nice dose of his Jewish sense of humor. I most enjoyed his discussions of memory and deception as well as his suggestions to use more rules to curtail temptations and keep you disciplined.


Intro
Studying social behavior

Escalation of commitments

Art and joy of saying no
When get request assume it is for next week. Would u cancel for it?
If have to cancel another activity for it, would u?
Cancel elation: would u feel happy if it got canceled?

Netflix dissatisfaction
Loss aversion
Think of it as museum

Dieting
Present focus bias
Hard to separate self into eater and noneater
Avoid exposing self to bad foods
Replace foods at home
Religious rules to dieting

Forgotten and forgiven loans
Loaner to bring it up and clarify

Marriage economics

Social networks and norms

Coffee
People paying for the story

Wedding ring
Give gift u don't enjoy shopping for as signal

Whistle blowing

Variety as memory enhancement
Break up week into series of separate experiences

Benefits of crowded places for dates
Misattribution of emotions

Hiring good and free advisor
What advice would give best friend in that situation

Garlic placebos

Specific requests
More likely to help when request is specific

Grandparents 
Saying sorry always helps

Thinking ahead
People think usually only 1 step ahead in game

Gossip as social coordination mechanism
To participate more fully in conversations

Marriage changes ur view of ur own relationship and long term thinking

Ruminating while running

Joy of getting things done
Hard to find joy when can't fully complete a big project at once
Potential to make something new perfect increases motivation
Pick projects that are self contained 

Multitasking

Calling home

Toasts and superstition
Low cost to ritual vs big cost to not following

Pickup lines
Compliments make people happier

Illusion of labor
Think time is wasted when don't see progress
Take joy from seeing someone work hard for us even if it takes longer
Make clear to others how hard u work

Misery of flying 
Think of marvel of flight
Evidence of common humanity

Flashy cars
Signaling

Dressing down
Wearing clothes from different culture prevents PPl thinking ur too casual

Exploring the unknown
Loss aversion makes us not try something new

Trying out relationships
Carry out experiments in similar situation 
Spend 2 weeks with girlfriend's mother

Divorce rate
2 good experiences: pleasures and comforts
Give up comforts and seek pleasure

Financial advisor
Imagine paying them monthly from ur checking account

Sharing food with squirrels

Internet social activity

Expectations and hiring
Dating: knowing more about someone leads to less love
CEOs hired from outside get paid more because don't know as much about them

Learning better decisions
Create good habits
Delegate difficult decisions to rules and habits

Power of expectations
Don't over heighten expectations
Don't exaggerate by too much; 10% ok

Communicating safety
Call mother at night

Perfect gift
Increase likelihood gift is used
Swap in gift for old ones so it's used

Eating lessons and kids
Maximizer should eat better food first
Avoiding minimum type should first eat worse food then better one after

Useful complaining
Think of reason someone is complaining and make most of it

Prices and bidding frenzy
Auctions: starting perspective vs competition
Initial asking price affects expectations

Stress and caring for old

Luck as multiple stage number game
Luckier people try things more often
In life decisions are not binary and involve multiple stages
Life is a numbers game
Cut options that aren't working

Socks and supernatural
Overcounting of missing socks
Involves how our memory works

Tithing
Giving money away leads to happiness
Have specific rules

Midlife cliche

Websites creating alibis
Increase dishonesty

Breakfast regrets
Counterfactuals
Comparing what could've been in imagined world
When don't imagine world then feel better

Night time activities
Problem of coordination
Suboptimal default option
Sequential coordination instead
Draw random activity per night

Playing parents
Move in for week with friends who have kids
Take care of kids of different age groups

Joint accounts

Wine ordering
Set limit on spending

Traffic jam altruism
Issues of control and credit/gratitude 

Idle waiting
Annoying irrationally to ppl

Forcing decisions with coins
Opportunity cost of time
Spinning coin forces us to decide which one we really want

Trashing norms
Changing social norms
Relentlessly critique violators
Create new social norm

Smoking
Effects cumulative and delayed

Adventures and investments
Life is about learning and improving where can become a different and better person

Retirement 

Correcting mistakes

Honesty on vacation

Paying food bill
Better for one person to pay and alternate to increase good feelings of free meal

Exercise time
Procrastination 

Memory
Fewer new experiences as age
More routine

Audiobooks

Pascal wager

Showing off price

Accumulating pleasure and pain
How to combine experiences
Extreme vs average approach
Pay attention to joyful part of each experience 

Lack of self control
Depletion after full day
Ability to resist urges depletes like muscle
Odysseus with sirens tied to mast with strict rule
Keep tempting food out of house

Balancing and rule of three
Sweet spot

Wasting time deciding
Limit time spent deciding group activity
Set up default activity if can't decide

Buffet ROI

Asking right questions
Ask the stupid questions

Donuts and locus of free will
We can design our environment to help overcome our weaknesses

Most optimistic day
New year resolutions wishful thinking

Investing
Hot cold empathy gap
Set up rules that prevent emotional decisions
Don't look at portfolio often
Limit our ability to make decisions

Commuting and adaptation
Uncertainty makes adapting to traffic difficult

Travel prices
Different emotional states when making decision vs having experience

Promotions 
Joy from developing in career
Invention of titles
Gamification for employees

Identifiable victim effect
Care more when see the victim vs when have psychological distance

Other job switching
Volunteer at other company for a while to see if like it during vacation

Moving or not
Endowment effect of current situation as reference point
Status quo bias: staying in same place is actually a decision
Frame move as 6 month trial

Bad academics
Hard to communicate
Curse of knowledge

Bad romance

Fun and self control

Shrinking and self deception

High heel attractiveness

Rules to overcome negative signals

Taxes and mitzvahs
Think of how much u made instead
How much giving to others
Duty and privilege
Reframing

Service word

Loss aversion and sports
Bad at predicting emotional response to losses
Enjoying process more important than final outcome

I just finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond, and I must admit it was quite a slog. The book is long, detailed, and not too entertaining.

It was recommended by Charles Munger in his Almanack, and I had heard about it many times before. The book's core question is indeed an interesting one: Why did some countries and societies develop so much more than others, conquering others and creating better life for their people? Is it due to racial differences or something else?

The book is #1 on Amazon in the category of "geography," and I think that was part of the slog of reading it; the extremely detailed info on the history, environment, and topography of all the different parts of the Earth was just less compelling to read as so many of the sub-points and background were not well connected to the main question in the book. The most interesting parts for me were the beginning and the end, which basically answer the question by saying that the differing environments and natural resources of the continents as well as the different societal organizational structures contributed to different levels of diffusion, migration, and technology development that allowed some societies to prosper more than others.

I did enjoy the discussion of how languages built on top of one another and how writing systems played a big role in societal development. It was obvious to me from the start how guns and steel would be useful for societies, but all the stuff about germs, food production, and animal domestication was a lot less obvious to from the start and was interesting to learn (though way too detailed and at times off topic for my taste).

Below are some of my notes and takeaways from the different chapters. If you really love history and geography as well as archaeology or the science of researching the past, this book is a good one for you. If not, I wouldn't recommend it.

Prologue
Differences between lifestyles in societies
Why did wealth and power become distributed as they are now?
Different rates of development
Europeans ended up with guns, the worst germs, and steel tools
Diversity in New Guinea; 6,000 human languages and 1,000 of them in New Guinea

Part 1

1 head start
New Guinea would've seemed to have gotten head start

2 a natural experiment
Polynesian history provides good test of development

3 collision
Guns
Ability to write

Part 2 the rise of food production

4 farmer power
Prerequisite for production of guns, germs, and steel
Horses
Manure

5 haves and have nots
Different resources and starting habits 

6 to farm or not to farm

7 how to make an almond
Crop development
Plants adapt to animals that eat them

8 apples or Indians
Fertile Crescent had better variety of plants and environment

9 domesticable animals
Need many factors like diet and character to work out for an animal to be domesticated for food production and hunting

10 spacious skies and tilted axes
Axis orientations of continents affected food production and resources

Part 3 from food to guns germs and steel

11 lethal gift of livestock
Germs from animals and people

12 blueprints and borrowed letters
Writing transmits knowledge
Borrowing writing systems

13 necessity mother

14 egalitarianism to kleptocracy
Religion supports politicians
Food production makes complex societies possible

Part 4 around the world

Ch 15 Australia and New Guinea 
Less cultural change

16 how china became Chinese

17 Polynesia
Outrigger canoe allowed travel over waves

18 hemispheres colliding
European discovery of America 
Food production tech and tools allowed Europeans to sail
Big domesticated animals in europe 
More germs in europe from crowded living created immunities
Metal tool use much more in europe
Sailing vessels
More use of writing in europe
Organization into states in europe

19 how Africa became black
Huge diversity
Language families show origins of people and their travel around world

Epilogue
Differences in societies due to differing environments
Diffusion and migration

Based on Noah Kagan's recommendation on his interview with Tim Ferriss, I just finished reading Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow.

The book was a fun, quick tour of various techniques used by unconventional "hackers" who achieved success much more quickly than traditionally thought possible.

I liked the beginning of the book more than the end, which seemed too light on new ideas and content. My favorite part of the book was the story of the perseverance of Jimmy Fallon.

Intro
Smart shortcuts to doing stuff way faster
Lateral thinking
Not following rules
Smartcuts not just shortcuts which can be amoral
Smartcuts are shortcuts with integrity
Short
Leverage
Soar

Part 1 short

1 hacking the ladder
Presidents younger than senators
BYU scavenger hunt game bigger or better
Psychology of small wins
Just keep the game going
Pivoting accelerates growth
Ladder switching in career
Use credibility to switch ladders to bypass dues

2 training with masters
Jimmy Fallon
Justin bieber had the best mentors who brought him up
Doctors learning patient handover from racing pit crews
Formal mentorship bad idea; informal personal relationships better
Learn and copy from masters yourself from books and videos of masters
Learn attention to detail
Study videos of masters obsessively and memorize facts and details of them

3 rapid feedback
Startup funeral: Funerals for startups to share what learned when failed
Past failure does not help with future ones according to studies
But succeeding makes you more likely to succeed
Failures caused more of own failures
Seeing others fail makes u do better
Doing well makes u do better
Failure paradox, attribution theory of failures to external things but success to internal things 
When others fail we attribute failure to others but when others succeed we attribute success to luck
Separate ego when you get feedback
Rapid scientific experiments

Part 2 leverage

4 platforms: the laziest programmer
Abstraction
Selective slacking
Ruby on Rails
Teaching kids how to learn instead of what to learn and memorize

5 waves
Waiting for the right wave
Pattern recognition 
Fast follower

6 superconnectors
Giving

Part 3 soar

7 momentum
Progress makes u happy
Big success needs u to continue progress even after big winning
Just keep moving
Build up potential energy so can leverage it when u get big break

8 simplicity
Innovation is about doing something different or simpler not just bigger
Simplify decisions to avoid unnecessary ones

9 10X thinking
Elon musk

Epilogue