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21 " and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles "
― Tim Harford , Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
22 " enough pieces of cheese and you can be fairly sure that the "
23 " Swiss cheese model’ of accidents. Imagine a series of safety "
24 " Poker players explained to me that there’s a particular moment at which players are extremely vulnerable to an emotional surge. It’s not when they’ve won a huge pot or when they’ve drawn a fantastic hand. It’s when they’ve just lost a lot of money through bad luck (a ‘bad beat’) or bad strategy. The loss can nudge a player into going ‘on tilt’ – making overly aggressive bets in an effort to win back what he wrongly feels is still his money. The brain refuses to register that the money has gone. Acknowledging the loss and recalculating one’s strategy would be the right thing to do, but that is too painful. Instead, the player makes crazy bets to rectify what he unconsciously believes is a temporary situation. It isn’t the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The eat economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk: ‘a person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise’. Even those of us who aren’t professional poker players know how it feels to chase a loss. "
25 " isn’t the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk: "
26 " wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He started by taking apart a "
27 " It was a dismal mismatch: Hitler had been single-mindedly building up his forces in the 1930s, while British defence spending was at historical lows. The Luftwaffe entered the Battle of Britain with "
28 " gamble in a wartime prison camp should serve as an example to the staff of the World Bank today. We’ll discover what the disasters at Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon have to tell us about preventing another Lehman Brothers crisis. We’ll learn from a watchmaker, "
29 " Esther Duflo, a leading randomista. ‘Sometimes "
30 " other tendency emerges because we rarely like the idea of standards that are inconsistent and uneven from place to place. It seems neater and fairer to provide a consistent standard for everything, whether it’s education, the road network or the coffee at "
31 " even have our own catchphrase, the ‘postcode lottery’, to describe the scandal that standards vary from place to place. It is something of a national obsession. We want all of our public services to be like Coca-Cola: all identical, all good. And they can’t be. If we are to take the ‘variation "
32 " It’s my job to run the division, and it’s your job to critique me.’ Petraeus "
33 " it is not enough to tolerate dissent: sometimes you have to demand it. Galvin "
34 " I spent the summer of 2005 studying poker. I interviewed some of the best players in the world, attended the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, analysed ‘pokerbots’ – poker-playing computers – and chronicled the efforts of "
35 " It’s so damn complex. If you ever think you have the solution to this, you’re wrong and you’re "
36 " Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy. "
37 " 150 miles outside Baghdad and began shooting children. By his own account, he ‘saw that children were in the room kneeling down. I "
38 " their mistakes. Most individuals suffer from the same problem. Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn’t work out, whether through luck or misjudgement. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle. 9 "
39 " we don’t ask what works, we simply gravitate to what sounds miraculous. "
40 " The Soviet failure revealed itself much more gradually: it was a pathological inability to experiment. The "