An Inquiring Mind

Self improvement according to science: motivation

11/12/2010

Some tips for motivation and goal-achieving which psychology research has found effective:

- make a step by step plan. Identify at least 5 sub-goals.
- make your goal public
- remind yourself why achieving that goal is important and all the good things that will happen to you if you achieve tour goal.
- reward yourself when you reach the intermediates milestones toward the path to achieving the ultimate goal
- Record your progress. Keep a log.

Use doublethink:
Be optimistic about the ultimate success and think of the good things that will happen when you'll finally complete your journey.
At the same time be realistic about the hardships: identify the biggest ostacles, describe them in detail and how you can deal with them.

Beat procrastination:
If you can be persuaded to work on your activity for just a few minutes, then your brain will want to complete the activit

Irrefutable laws of marketing

26/11/2010

From http://irrefutablelaws.weebly.com/.

Speaking about influence and persuasion. I agree with everything.

1) Ethos (your perceived character) is the most important.

2) People make judgments by comparison/anchoring.

3) People process information best from stories.

4) People are foremost interested in things that effect them.

5) Breaking patterns gets attention.

6) People look to other people's decisions when making decisions.

7) People will believe things more easily that fit their pre-existent mindset. The converse is also true.

8) People handle one idea at a time best.

9) People want more choices, but are happier with fewer.

10) People decide first, then rationalize - If people are stuck with something, they will like it more over time.

11) Experience is memory, the last part of the experience is weighted heavily.

Self improvement according to science: persuasion

21/11/2010

Here is a quick review of the second chapter of "59 seconds: think a little change a lot" which is dedicated to persuasion.

- monetary reward does not incentive people to do a better job. Usually they think something on the line of "people pay me to do stuff I don't like, so I should not like doing this job"
- An effective strategy to motivate people is a small surprising reward or praise if it was an enjoiable work and if it's a boring job a small reward followed by feel-good comments.
- In a job interview how likeable you are it's much more important than your education or work experience.
- You'll be ore likeable if you talk early of your weaknesses and later of your strenghts.
- People are too much self consciuos of their mistakes. Experience teach us that other people is less judgmental about our mistakes than ourselves.
- In a group of people the guys in the middle seems more likeable and important
- A simple name usually has more business success than a complex and long one.
- A overly sophisticated language does not commends respect. People prefer reading simple and clear explanations.
- As Benjamin Franklin once discovered, people will like you if you ask them a little help.
- Making people smile makes then happy and making people look in your eyes will make you more attractive for them.
- A little mistake when you are doing everything good makes you more human and so more likeable.
- An argument exposed in rhyme seems more persuasive
- People make faster and impulsive decisions if they are eating
- It's easier to persuade if you start with a question that solicits an affermative answer
- You should make it personal: millions of people dying does not move like one single child in need.
- Humor helps
- People like more those who are similar to them
- In emergency situations the more people are present the less likely someone will do something. People watch others and copy their behaviour.
- Little and spontaneus gestures of help make people willing to help you back. Even more if you don't know the other guy very well
- People are genetically wired to respond positively to faces of babies.

Self Improvement according to science: Happiness

20/11/2010

I'm reading "59 seconds: think a little change a lot" by Richard Wiseman.
Wiseman is a former magician/illusionist turned academic psychologist.
The book aim is to investigate what science and real experiments can tell us about psychological self improvement.

The book is divided in chapters that represents the popular themes that many self help and nlp books address:
Happiness, Persuasion, Motivation, Creativity, Attraction, Relationships, Stress, Decision Making, Parenting, Personality.

Wiseman writes that science dimostraded that we can make ourselves more happy with the following actions:

- write about the things in your life for which you are grateful
- write about some wonderful experiences you had in your life
- write about an imaginary future when everything has gone very good for you and you have become exatcly the person you want to be
- write about someone you love and who is very important in your life
- write a mini-review of you past week pointing out three good things that happened to you
- Buy experiences, not goods
- Give something to charity
- Smile
- Keep the posture and the walking movements of an happy person. Act
happy.

Jedi mind tricks

9/11/2010

"These are not the droids you're looking for. " Obi-Wan Kenobi

Recently I've been studying thep psychology of influence and persuasion and how the human mind is surprisingly predictably irrational.
Everything started with a fiction book, The Game, where Neil Strauss describes the world of pick-up artists (PUA).
Basically these guys spend their time studying the best ways to seduce women (i.e. improving their "game") and some of them make a living teaching their secrets to shy man who cannot get gerls.

Besides being interesting and quite a page-turner this book generated in me an interest in how humans are irrational, malleable and basically still driven by their primordial instincts.

So The Game was a starting point which lead me to study evolutionary psychology, neuro-lingustic programming (NLP), hypnosis, Cialdini's work on influence, mentalism and cold reading and behavioural economics.

NLP is a pseudo-science. It does not follow the scientific method, many of its basic tenets have been proven wrong and I could call it bogus.
But I still think there something that works but nobody knows why.

Evolutionary psychology is great. "The selfish gene" and "Sperm Wars" are worth reading.

Cialdini's "Influence" is a classic, and still studied in many business schools.

Since Tvesky & Kahneman "Judgment under uncertainty" the academics are well aware that humans are far from the rational agents described in classical economics.

A good read on cognitive biases and behavioural economics is "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariel.

Lesswrong is a web community full of smart guys who wants to learn to be truly rational and overcome human wired-in-the-brain biases.

I also think we have a lot to learn from mentalists and magicians. Many of them are skeptics in Randi's tradition and "The full fact of cold reading" by Ian Rowland shows how it is possible that some guy can fools many people and claim to be psychic.
It's easier than you might think!

"Fooled by Randomness" also shows many cognitive biases and how humans brains cannot fully grasp theory of probability.

Navarro's "What every body says" and Ekman Paul (the guy who ispirates the TV show Lie to me) work's both address the controversial topic of body language and reading people.
Be careful, a recent study showed that even the best experts cannot tell if a person is lying with an accuracy greater than 60%.

I'll write more in detail about all different aspects fo persuasion and reading people in future posts.
Maybe I'll put some detailed reviews of the books I read.

Investing: my first time

22/6/2010

I have about 20k euro to invest.
It's my first time and I don't know really how to move. I read A Random Walk down Wall Street and so I want to put most of them on index funds.
But I don't really know which ones and being Italian maybe I have to pay some extra taxes if I buy American funds.
Maybe my bank can make me buy only some kinds of funds she is enable to.
Or maybe not.
Anyway here I am : theoretically I know many things, in practice I'm a beginner

University, real world and learning to program

20/5/2010

Hi to all,
this is my first post on this blog where I intend to share my thoughts about many things, usually programming, science, technology, health, artificial intelligence, economics and entrepreneurship.

I started this blog with the secondary aim to practice my english.

I want to begin telling you about my feelings right after university.
I did the Italian equivalent of a Bsc and a Msc on Computer Engineering.

I learned many things about math, statistics, physics, electronics, automation, computer networks and of course programming and software engineering.

I worked mainly in Java, but had exposure also to other languages like C,C#, Prolog. I was taught information systems and SQL and a few things about web applications (MySql, JSP and Servlet using Tomcat as a container).

But I didn't feel I was a good programmer. I lacked real experience and an hacking attitude.

Got a job as a system administrator and began reading hackernews every day.

I have started to play a bit with many programming languages with different programming paradigms: Ruby, Python, Clojure, Common Lisp.

I think that programming is the sort of thing you can't really learn in school.

Like swimming,skiing and playing tennis you learn it mostly by doing and self discovery.
A great mentor is an invaluable help of course, but the learning process should start from YOU.

Just sitting in your chair at the university with the sole aim of getting good grades will not do the job.

First Post!

19/5/2010

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