Counterfactual thinking

In the case of Olympic Medalists, counterfactual thinking explains why bronze medalists are often more satisfied with the outcome than silver medalists. The counterfactual thoughts for silver medalists tend to be how they could have done things differently in order to have achieved the gold medal. This allows them to over think what they did wrong rather than focus on the accomplishment. Whereas for bronze medalists, they tend to counterfactual think about how they could have not received a medal at all. This allows for them to feel accomplished that they placed at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_thinking#Examples

Without pen and paper try to guess the answer to the following problem: "One in a thousand people has a prevalence for a particular heart disease. There is a test to detect this disease. The test is 100% accurate for people who have the disease and is 95% accurate for those who don't (this means that 5% of people who do not have the disease will be wrongly diagnosed as having it). 

If a randomly selected person tests positive what is the probability that the person actually has the disease?"

Answer: 2%. It should be positive for 50 people from 1000 but only for one of them the test will not lie (select the white text)


One more experiment for those who found the task interesting.

The notion of beauty is relative and the term completely looses its sense when we take subjects from different species. Take a nice peacock's tail for instance. Oh, I said nice? his enemies would not say so. While peacock's plumage looks cute for humans and sexually attractive for peahens, when he displays feathering to an enemy, such as a small dog, from the predator's perspective it looks like there are thousands of blazing eyes staring at it from a meter height and the dog often retreats.
 
In other words beauty is subjective, and it is also true for words like good / easy / clear / useful / hard / interesting / etc as the same object can be treated differently by different people. So always ask yourself good / easy / .. for whom or for what?

Learned helplessness

In 1965, psychologists Mark Seligman and Steve Maier conducted an experiment in which three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Dogs from group one were released after a certain amount of time, with no harm done. Dogs from group two were paired up and leashed together, and one from each pair was given electrical shocks that could be ended by pressing a lever. Dogs from group three were also paired up and leashed together, one receiving shocks, but the shocks didn’t end when the lever was pressed. Shocks came randomly and seemed inevitable, which caused “learned helplessness,” the dogs assuming that nothing could be done about the shocks. The dogs in group three ended up displaying symptoms of clinical depression. Later, group three dogs were placed in a box with by themselves. They were again shocked, but they could easily end the shocks by jumping out of the box. These dogs simply “gave up,” again displaying learned helplessness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

When we began the research project, we expected to find that the first step in taking a company from good to great would be to set a new direction, a new vision and strategy for the company, and then to get people committed and aligned behind that new direction. We found something quite the opposite.

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it. They said, in essence, "Look, I don't really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we'll figure out how to take it someplace great."

From good to great, Jim Collins

A few words about homeopathy

Although there are several different approaches, homeopathy generally involves first finding a cure by the principle of similars, which says that the remedy should be of a substance known to create the very symptoms the patient is already suffering. Then that remedy is diluted in water or alcohol to the point where the solution handed to the patient contains no molecules of the original remedy.

A typical homeopathic dilution is done in ratios of one part of the substance to ninety-nine parts alcohol or water (depending on whether the substance is soluble in water). This process is repeated—a dilution of one part of the original solution to ninety-nine parts water or alcohol—again and again. It’s quite normal to do this thirty times—this is called a 30C dilution. That means, if you started by dissolving a tiny amount of your remedy in around fifteen drops of water, you would end up with the original substance diluted in a volume of water fifty times bigger than the Earth. The big scientific problem with this is that when the homeopathic pharmacist sells you a few milliliters of this remedy, the math of chemistry tells you there is virtually no chance that it contains a single molecule of the original substance.

13 Things that don't make sense

The people of India, having been pestered by monkeys over the years, developed an ingenious way of trapping them. They would dig a long, narrow hole in the ground and then use an equally long, slender object to widen the bottom of the hole. Then they would pour rice down into the wider portion at the bottom of the hole. Monkeys like to eat. In fact, that’s a large part of what makes them such pests. They’ll jump onto cars or risk running through large groups of people to snatch food right out of your hand. People in South India are painfully aware of this. (Believe me, it’s surprisingly unsettling to be standing serenely in a park and have a macaque come suddenly barreling through to snatch something from you.) So the monkeys would come along, discover the rice, and stretch their arms deep into the hole. Their hands would be at the bottom. They would greedily clutch as much of the rice as possible into their hands, making a fist in the process. Their fists would fit into the larger portion of the hole, but the rest of the narrow opening was too small for the monkeys to pull their fists through. They’d be stuck. Of course, they could just let go of the food, and they’d be free. But monkeys place a high value on food. In fact, they place such a high value on food that they cannot force themselves to let go of it. They’ll grip that rice until either it comes out of the ground or they die trying to pull it out. It was typically the latter that happened first.

This story illustrates a concept of value rigidity. Value rigidity is what happens when you believe in the value of something so strongly that you can no longer objectively question it. Now what are your rigid assumptions?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsing