I enjoy ‘working out’ why people do things, in the meteorological sense (i.e. a complicated model giving only hints of the relationships and variables and, of necessity, tolerant of inexactitude).

As mentioned earlier Vance Packard’s The HIdden Persuaders opened my eyes to how very trivial inputs can lead people to reach significant wide-reading conclusions which affect their actions … without understanding the triggers.

Bob Dylan says in his Chronicles volume 1 that he stopped reading psychology when a friend pointed out that the top people/high priests of psychology were all in marketing and advertising.

I still find it (and M Gladwell et al) very interesting. – P

There is a great book by Malcom Gladwell called “Outliers.” It’s a terrific read and goes into depth on “seemingly unrelated and mysterious social patterns.” As it turns out things are not so mysterious after all. Excellent book!

These last two charts demonstrate that it is supremely wicked to look at data on a short term basis as this recent NZ Herald article does.

Understatement of the week!

Thanks Chowbok. November, huh?

This exercise reminds me of a little book I have somewhere: “Don’t sell stocks on Monday” which (among other things) showed (with graphs & tables to prove it) Mondays were generally a bad day to get a good price for shares. I think the ‘explanation’ was that the punters digested bad news over the weekend and ‘dumped’ stocks reactively on Mondays.

A nice line attributed to Yogi Berra …

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”