Alchemy by Sutherland, Rory -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

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Index

Cover Title Page Contents Rory’s Rules of Alchemy Prologue: Challenging Coca-Cola

The Case for Magic

Introduction: Cracking the (Human) Code

Introducing Psycho-Logic Some Things Are Dishwasher-Proof, Others Are Reason-Proof Crime, Fiction and Post-Rationalism: Or Why Reality Isn’t Nearly as Logical as We Think The Danger of Technocratic Elites On Nonsense and Non-Sense The Opposite of a Good Idea Can Be a Good Idea Context Is Everything The Four S-es Why We Should Ignore Our GPS

Part 1: On the Uses and Abuses of Reason

1.1: The Broken Binoculars 1.2: I Know It Works in Practice, but Does It Work in Theory? On John Harrison, Semmelweis and the Electronic Cigarette 1.3: Psychological Moonshots 1.4: In Search of the ‘Real Why?’ Uncovering Our Unconscious Motivations 1.5: The Real Reason We Clean Our Teeth 1.6: The Right Thing for the Wrong Reason 1.7: How You Ask the Question Affects the Answer 1.8: ‘A Change in Perspective Is Worth 80 IQ Points’ 1.9: Be Careful with Maths: Or Why the Need to Look Rational Can Make You Act Dumb 1.10: Recruitment and Bad Maths 1.11: Beware of Averages 1.12: What Gets Mismeasured Gets Mismanaged 1.13: Biased about Bias 1.14: We Don’t Make Choices as Rationally as We Think 1.15: Same Facts, Different Context 1.16: Success Is Rarely Scientific – Even in Science 1.17: The View Back Down the Mountain: The Reasons We Supply for Our Experimental Successes 1.18: The Overuse of Reason 1.19: An Automatic Door Does Not Replace a Doorman: Why Efficiency Doesn’t Always Pay

Part 2: An Alchemist’s Tale (Or Why Magic Really Still Exists)

2.1: The Great Upside of Abandoning Logic – You Get Magic 2.2: Turning Lead into Gold: Value Is in the Mind and Heart of the Valuer 2.3: Turning Iron and Potatoes into Gold: Lessons from Prussia 2.4: The Modern-Day Alchemy of Semantics 2.5: Benign Bullshit – and Hacking the Unconscious 2.6: How Colombians Re-Imagined Lionfish (With a Little Help from Ogilvy and the Church) 2.7: The Alchemy of Design 2.8: Psycho-Logical Design: Why Less Is Sometimes More

Part 3: Signalling

3.1: Prince Albert and Black Cabs 3.2: A Few Notes on Game Theory 3.3: Continuity Probability Signalling: Another Name for Trust 3.4: Why Signalling Has to Be Costly 3.5: Efficiency, Logic and Meaning: Pick Any Two 3.6: Creativity as Costly Signalling 3.7: Advertising Does Not Always Look Like Advertising: The Chairs on the Pavement 3.8: Bees Do It 3.9: Costly Signalling and Sexual Selection 3.10: Necessary Waste 3.11: On the Importance of Identity 3.12: Hoverboards and Chocolate: Why Distinctiveness Matters

Part 4: Subconscious Hacking: Signalling to Ourselves

4.1: The Placebo Effect 4.2: Why Aspirin Should Be Reassuringly Expensive 4.3: How We Can ‘Hack’ What We Can’t Control 4.4: ‘The Conscious Mind Thinks It’s the Oval Office, When in Reality It’s the Press Office’ 4.5: How Placebos Help Us Recalibrate for More Benign Conditions 4.6: The Hidden Purposes Behind Our Behaviour: Why We Buy Clothes, Flowers or Yachts 4.7: On Self-Placebbing 4.8: What Makes an Effective Placebo? 4.9: The Red Bull Placebo 4.10: Why Hacking Often Involves Things That Don’t Quite Make Sense

Part 5: Satisficing

5.1: Why It’s Better to Be Vaguely Right than Precisely Wrong 5.2: (I Can’t Get No) Satisficing 5.3: We Buy Brands to Satisfice 5.4: He’s Not Stupid, He’s Satisficing 5.5: Satisficing: Lessons from Sport 5.6: JFK vs EWR: Why the Best Is Not Always the Least Worst

Part 6: Psychophysics

6.1: Is Objectivity Overrated? 6.2: How to Buy a Television for Your Pet Monkey 6.3: Lost and Gained in Translation: Reality and Perception as Two Different Languages 6.4: Mokusatsu: The A-Bomb, the H-Bomb and the C-Bomb 6.5: Nothing New under the Sun 6.6: When It Pays to Be Objective – and When It Doesn’t 6.7: How Words Change the Taste of Biscuits 6.8: The Map Is Not the Territory, but the Packaging Is the Product 6.9: The Focusing Illusion 6.10: Bias, Illusion and Survival 6.11: How to Get a New Car for £50 6.12: Psychophysics to Save the World 6.13: The Ikea Effect: Why It Doesn’t Pay to Make Things Too Easy 6.14: Getting People to Do the Right Thing Sometimes Means Giving Them the Wrong Reason

Part 7: How to Be an Alchemist

7.1: The Bad News and the Good News 7.2: Alchemy Lesson One: Given Enough Material to Work On, People Often Try to Be Optimistic 7.3: Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons and Minimising Regret 7.4: Alchemy Lesson Two: What Works at a Small Scale Works at a Large Scale 7.5: Alchemy Lesson Three: Find Different Expressions for the Same Thing 7.6: Alchemy Lesson Four: Create Gratuitous Choices 7.7: Alchemy Lesson Five: Be Unpredictable 7.8: Alchemy Lesson Six: Dare to Be Trivial 7.9: Alchemy Lesson Seven: In Defence of Trivia

Conclusion: On Being a Little Less Logical

Solving Problems Using Rationality Is Like Playing Golf With Only One Club Finding the Real Why: We Need to Talk about Unconscious Motivations Rebel against the Arithmocracy Always Remember to Scent the Soap Back to the Galapagos

Endnotes About the Author Copyright About the Publisher

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