Joseph Thibault

“Press Enter_” or “The Persistence of Vision” you have to leave out five other stories? Even as it is, I had to leave out some of my very favorite writers and stories—Peter Dickinson’s “Flight,” for instance, and Felix Gottschalk’s “Vestibular Man,” David Bunch’s Moderan stories; and I’m dismayed at the list of writers not represented here—Bruce Sterling, Connie Willis, Nancy Kress, Lucius Shepherd, Lois McMaster Bujold, Norman Spinrad, Clifford Simak, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Dave Wolverton”
― Orson Scott Card, Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century

“Food waste in households, restaurants and shops is a different issue. In principle it should be straightforward: just buy what you need and make sure you eat it. But human behaviour is hard to change. There are some things that can help.”
― Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

“Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“In the classic demonstration of the illusion of control, the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer had students guess the outcome of a coin toss, heads or tails. They were then told whether they were correct or not in their guesses. In three separate setups, the outcomes were predetermined in a specific order: they could be distributed in an intuitively random pattern, there could be more correct guesses clustered near the beginning, or there could be more correct guesses clustered near the end. In each case, the absolute numbers were the same. The only difference was the order. But the results couldn’t have been more different. After the guesses concluded, Langer asked each participant a series of questions: Did they feel they could improve on this task? Did they feel they were particularly talented at it? Did they need more time to get better? Would they be better with limited distraction? And so on. In each case, the obvious answer is no: to answer otherwise is to classify something that is the outcome of chance (a coin toss) as being in the realm of skill. But the obvious answer is not the answer she got. When students had a random progression or one where the accuracy clustered near the end, they did indeed answer in the negative. But when the correct answers were clustered up front, they developed a sudden myopia. Why yes, they said, they are quite good at this, and yes, they would improve with time. Success led to an abject failure of objectivity: suddenly, they were in the throes of the illusion of control. They thought that they could actually predict the results of a coin toss. If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing. As Langer titled her paper: “Tails, I Win. Heads, It’s Chance.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win