Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Greta Gerwig Talks

Of the countless reviews and social analyses of Barbie, only Allison Davis captures the unmistakable hallmark of the film’s celebrated director: the big speech. Writing in The Vulture, Davis breaks it down:

In every Greta Gerwig movie, there is that speech, the one that forces the emotion out of you no matter how unsentimental you might be. That big juicy monologue somewhere in the third act that states everything the female protagonist wants out of life — her dreams, her desires — and everything she fears. The emotionally pure, ultra-relatable moment when Gerwig tells us how a woman should be. The music swells; the actress’s face splits open with yearning and pathos. Inevitably, someone in the movie theater gives a reflexive “Yessss” under their breath, and thousands of theater kids suddenly know what their audition monologue will be for the fall production of Our Town.

2. Rock, Paper, Loser

The outcome of Rock, Paper, Scissors is arbitrary. Or is it? Greg Costikyan, a master designer of games, shows how to gain an edge:

One heuristic of experienced players is “Losers lead with Rock.” This is demonstrably true; naïve players will lead with Rock more often than one-third of the time. Your hand begins in the form of a rock, and it is easiest to keep it that way. The name of the game begins with “Rock,” and if you are mentally sorting through the options, it is the first one that will occur to you. And the word “rock” itself has connotations of strength and immovability. These factors lead players to choose Rock on their first go more often than chance would dictate. An experienced player can take advantage of this. Against a player you know to be naïve, you play Paper.

3. Time Is Money

When the Shopify COO grew tired of pointless, time-draining meetings, he launched a calculator embedded in everyone’s calendars. It displays the “cost” of every meeting with three or more people:

The tool uses average compensation data across roles and disciplines, along with meeting length and attendee count, to put a price tag on the event. A typical 30 minute endeavor with three employees can run from $700 up to $1,600. Adding an executive — like Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian, who built the program during a company-wide hack day — can shoot the cost above $2,000…“No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner,” Nejatian said in an interview. “But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision. The goal of this thing is to show you that time is money. If you have to spend it, you think about it.”

4. Send Check Now

If you doubt that direct mail solicitation works, read Rachel Brown’s article in The Walrus about Patrice Runner, who created a multi-million dollar business while promoting the services of an alleged psychic. Reader beware:

 People who responded sometimes received lottery numbers or fortunes in the mail; sometimes they received objects or crystals. But they also received more letters—sometimes over a hundred in just a few months—asking for more money. In the two decades between 1994 and 2014, Runner’s business brought in more than $175 million from nearly a million and a half people across Canada and the US…” With writing,” Runner says, “you can get the attention of someone, and at the end, after a few minutes, the person sends a cheque, to get a product, to an address or company they’ve never heard of.”

5. Business Needs Novels

If you can ignore the pomposity of his writing style, Simon Sarris makes a persuasive argument about why professionals ought to put down their non-fiction books and pick up a novel:

 Among my professional peers in the industry of software, that there is too great a fondness for non-fiction. I think this arises from a belief that superior knowledge of the world comes from non-fiction. This thought is attractive to people who build systems, but over-systematizing and seeing systems in everything can be a failure mode. Careful descriptions and summaries miss too much of the world. Hard distinctions make bad philosophy. Reading fiction helps you become an unsystematic thinker, something that is equally valuable but more elided by some engineers. It is easy to maintain an intellectual rigidity. It takes more care to maintain a loose poeticism of thought.

6. SAT Math

Freddie DeBoer reminds us that, even as universities abandon it, the SAT remains a strong predictor of college success. He explains what many critics misunderstand:

Why do raw reported SAT-college GPA correlations look low? The fundamental problem is that correlations gathered at any given college can only include students who go to that college. Students who went to better or worse colleges aren’t in your data, and students who didn’t go to college at all aren’t in anyone’s data. This is absolutely basic range restriction stuff.

Websites Worth Reading

How Rich Am I?: Wealth calculator, encouraging donations

What am I missing?: Economics, regulation, antitrust blog

Short Of The Week: Weekly short movies

Feeds We Follow

@trevorbmbagency: Images, brands

@davidfrum: Fixing the student loan problem

@Alan_Allport: Alan Allport on the Hamburg bombing