In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Dan Ariely describes an experiment to determine how much people cheat: [P]articipants entered a room where they sat in chairs with small desks attached (the typical exam-style setup). Next, each participant received a sheet of paper containing a series of twenty different matrices … and were told that their task was to find in each of these matrices two numbers that added up to 10 …

A common theme I see on my weekly visits to Twitter is the hordes piling onto the latest psychological study or effect that hasn’t survived a replication or meta-analysis. More often than not, the study deserves the criticism. But recently, the hordes have occasionally swung into action too quickly. One series of tweets suggested that loss aversion had entered the replication crisis. A better description of the two papers that triggered the tweets is that they were the latest salvos in a decade-old debate about the interpretation of many loss aversion experiments.

I first came across the idea of teacher expectations turning into self-fulfilling prophesies more than a decade ago, in Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: One of the classic stories in the field of self-fulfilling prophecies is of a computer in England that was accidently programmed incorrectly. In academic terms, it labeled a class of “bright” kids “dumb” kids and a class of supposedly “dumb” kids “bright.

Daniel Kahneman has a new book in the pipeline called Noise. It is to be co-authored with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony, and will focus on the “chance variability in human judgment”, the “noise” of the book’s title. I hope the book is more Kahneman than Sunstein. For all Thinking, Fast and Slow’s faults, it is a great book. You can see the thought that went into constructing it. Sunstein’s recent books feel like research papers pulled together by a university student - which might not be too far from the truth given the fleet of research assistants at Sunstein’s command.

Tyler Cowen’s Conversations with Tyler feature a section in which Cowen throws a series of ideas at the guest, and the guest responds with whether each idea is overrated or underrated. In a few of the conversations, Cowen asks about behavioural economics. Here are three responses: Atul Gawande COWEN: The idea of nudge. GAWANDE: I think overrated. COWEN: Why? GAWANDE: I think that there are important insights in nudge units and in that research capacity, but when you step back and say, “What are the biggest problems in clinical behavior and delivery of healthcare?

After my recent post on how I focus, I received a couple of requests for the blogs I follow. Here are my current subscriptions in Feedly, with occasional comments. Some of these blogs have been in my reader for years, others I am trialling. I am usually trialling a few at any time, and tend to have a “one in, one out” pattern of subscription. It normally takes me about 10 minutes once every day or two to scan the new entries and decide which are worth reading.

In 2011, Thorstein Veblen was ranked seventh in a poll of economists on their favourite, dead, 20th century economist. He ranked behind Keynes, Friedman, Samuelson, Hayek, Schumpeter and Galbraith. His supporters were among the least liberal (in the classical sense of the word) of the survey participants. Given his approach to consumerism, as detailed in The Theory of the Leisure Class, this is no surprise. The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, was one of the earliest books to explore the economic assumption that people wish to consume.

This post is a record of some strategies that I use to focus and be mildly productive. It also records a few other features of my lifestyle. Why develop these strategies? On top of delivering in my day job, I have always tried to invest heavily in my human capital, and that takes a degree of focus. The need to adopt many of the below also reflects how easily distracted I am.

Michael Mauboussin’s message in More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places is that we need an interdisciplinary toolkit to give us the diversity to make good decisions. This is not diversity in groups, but diversity in thinking. You need diverse cognitive tools to deal with diverse problems. The book is a series of essays that Mauboussin wrote for a newsletter over a dozen years or so when he was at CSFB.

I have mixed views about Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Cain makes an important point that many of our environments, social structures and workplaces are unsuited to “introverts” (and possibly even humans in general). We could design more productive and inclusive workplaces, schools and organisations if we considered the spectrum of personality types who will work, live and learn in them.