Amanda Penn, Author at Shortform Books

Adolphe Quetelet: Big Mistakes of a Brilliant Statistician

Who was Adolphe Quetelet? Why is he famous, and what was one of his biggest scientific mistakes? Adolphe Quetelet (Quételet) was a Belgian mathematician who developed the idea of the “average human” (l’homme moyen) through the use of “means”—golden averages that represented the ideal human form. He lived from 1796 to 1874. We’ll cover Adolphe Quetelet’s mistake in assuming that all phenomena can be charted on a bell curve and we’ll look at how we understand the world differently today.

Falsification: Why You Should Try to Disprove Your Beliefs

What is falsification? Why is looking for ways to disprove our own theories productive? Falsification is the act of looking for evidence that disproves a scientific theory. The idea was introduced by philosopher of science Karl Popper. We’ll cover why falsification is necessary for unbiased science.

Mediocristan: The Predictable, Boring World (Black Swan)

What is Mediocristan? Where is it? Where does the word come from? What elements of our lives fall under the purview of Mediocristan? Mediocristan is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain the facets of our experience that are nonscalable. Mediocristan’s law is: Given a large-enough sample size, no individual event will have a significant effect on the total. The term was popularized by Taleb’s book The Black Swan. We’ll cover what Mediocristan is, how it differs from Extremistan, and what kinds of events, characteristics, and professions come from the land of Mediocristan.

Power of Context–Your Idea Won’t Spread in the Wrong Setting

What is the “Power of Context”? Where does it come from? Why is it important in business, sales, and marketing? The Power of Context is the idea that the environment in which the message or idea is delivered can have a huge impact on whether enough people adopt and spread it to create an epidemic. This idea was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. We’ll cover examples of the power of context and look at why the context of a message can make all the difference.

Weak Inductive Arguments: You Make Them All the Time

What is an example of a weak inductive argument? Why are so many inductive arguments weak? We’ll cover some famously weak inductive arguments and explore two ways to be a better, more logical thinker.

Rule of 150: Why the Most Effective Groups Are Small

What is the Rule of 150? What does it say about how we function and cooperate in large and small groups? The Rule of 150 is a concept in sociology that says that social structures function best at or under 150 people. Groups bigger than 150 people tend to break into smaller groups in order to function. We’ll look at an example of the Rule of 150 to see how it functions in business organizations.

The Bell Curve: Does It Actually Explain the Real World?

Does the bell curve accurately describe the world? When does the bell curve work, and when does it fail? How can we make better predictions and more accurately describe the phenomena of real life? We’ll cover the situations in which the normal bell curve distribution is a good predictor of the real world, the situations where it’s not, and better ways to represent randomness in an uncertain world.

Narrative Fallacy: When Storytelling Is Dangerous

What is the narrative fallacy? How does our natural tendency to tell stories get in our way? The narrative fallacy is the cognitive bias that puts us in danger of ascribing meaning or cause to random events. Humans are evolutionarily conditioned—by the development of the left hemisphere of our brains—to reduce the complexity of the world’s information; and the most efficient way of simplifying that complexity is through storytelling. We’ll cover the narrative fallacy, look at narrative fallacy examples, and suggest two ways to counter it.

What Is Scalability? (And Why Should You Care?)

What is scalability? How does scalability affect our lives? When is scalability a good thing? When is it a negative thing? Scalability is the characteristic or ability of a company or process to grow and adapt to changing demands. In the scalable parts of our lives, physical limits don’t apply and effects tend toward incredible extremes. We’ll further explore the scalability definition above, cover how scalability affects our lives, and cover which areas of our lives are most impacted by scalability.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Maven: Why You Need One on Your Team

Who is Malcolm Gladwell’s “maven”? How are mavens crucial to the spread of ideas and important for business? Mavens are information specialists. They are the kinds of people who are endlessly curious and adept at gathering and retaining information on a wide variety of (sometimes obscure) topics. The term comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. We’ll cover the role of Malcolm Gladwell’s mavens in business and why they’re crucial to the spread of ideas, services, and products.