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I found this talk on ted.com and I’ve been meaning to post something about, so here it is:

In the video at 3:50 he talks about Impact Bias:
“Winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have.”
I think that’s pretty interesting. I think that once you realize this it can help to put things into perspective when you feel really bad about something. And perhaps the “it’s all gonna be alright”-argument isn’t so lame after all.

Another thing he said around 17:25 about the students who can either change or not change their picture:
“People who have no choice and can never change their mind, like it a lot.”
I’m no psychologist so I might be completely wrong here, but I’m wondering if that’s why people are divorcing now more than they used to. Because they know they have a choice and then they’ll start doubting and will become unhappy. Maybe it also works the other way around: if you tell yourself that you had no choice in a certain situation then you’ll be happy with it, whatever it was.
Now I wouldn’t be a computer scientist if I wouldn’t consider the boundaries of this: So, what if you make all your decisions by throwing dice? Whatever the random outcome would be, you’d have to stick with it and you can’t change it. Now would this make you permanently happy about all your decisions?
Probably not, but either way, it’s an interesting talk =)

I ran into this article from Paul Graham a while ago. He’s from a venture capital company called Y Combinator (which seems pretty cool btw) and when I read his articles I got all dreamy and motivated and got in my “let’s do something great!”-mindset. Usually this ends in me getting excited about something and then getting distracted again with something else that’s also very cool of course. But anyway… one of the things from that article that I liked was:

When we first met the founders of Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not a great bet to succeed, because they didn’t seem especially committed. One of the two founders was still in grad school. It was the usual story: he’d drop out if it looked like the startup was taking off. Since then he has not only dropped out of grad school, but appeared full length in Newsweek with the word “Billionaire” printed across his chest. He just cannot fail now. Everyone he knows has seen that picture. Girls who dissed him in high school have seen it. His mom probably has it on the fridge. It would be unthinkably humiliating to fail now. At this point he is committed to fight to the death.

Perhaps I just need to make my plans/dreams more public so there will be more pressure to actually make them come true.

Oh and then I ran into this robot company which seems really cool and makes me wonder why I left Artificial Intelligence andandand! Wait, I’m getting distracted again.