The one sentence summary

To be brilliant, you have to be irrational – ideas that don’t make sense have surprising power.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • The author sets out 11 rules of alchemy:
    1. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
    2. Don’t design for average.
    3. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical.
    4. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience.
    5. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.
    6. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic.
    7. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident.
    8. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
    9. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club.
    10. Dare to be trivial.
    11. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Economic logic assumes that everyone makes rational decisions, but they don’t. Psycho-logic takes the vagaries of irrationality into account.
  • Alchemy is not pure irrationality – it is second-order social intelligence applied to an uncertain world. Simple economic models have a narrow view of human motivation and so pose a threat to the human imagination.
  • If we could resist the urge to be logical just some of the time, and devote that time instead to the pursuit of alchemy, what might we discover?
  • As American physicist Richard Feyman explains, when we look for a new law, first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess.
  • Just a few wrong assumptions in statistics can lead to intelligent people being spectacularly wrong. When you multiply bullshit with bullshit, you don’t get a bit more bullshit – you get bullshit squared.
  • What really is and what we perceive can be very different.
  • Perception may map neatly on to behaviour, but reality does not map neatly onto perception.
  • Behaviour comes first; attitude changes to keep up.
  • We spend a lot of time signalling to ourselves – a form of self-placebo. As an active verb, evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls this self-placebbing.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Nothing. The footnotes alone are an inspiring read.