Contrast the introductory paragraphs with Venkatesh Rao's piece on "Rediscovering literacy" -- what makes the difference?

"Here are two more hints if you want to reduce keystrokes: first, note that “Tab” is also C-i, a discovery many years ago that has saved my left wrist from tens of thousands of left-twists to get my finger to the Tab key. Second, you can enter a numeric prefix without C-u by simply combining digits with the Meta key; M-8 accomplishes in a single keystroke what otherwise requires C-u 8 two keystrokes."

"One analogy I always liked to tell hearing people: Imagine if you lived in a world of telepaths, where everybody could communicate with each other except for you."

cperciva's achievements: interesting when you think about tarsnap's pricing model (picodollars etc)

"If these researchers were able to look at it this way -- as the control of perception -- I think there would be a couple of things they could try that might improve things. One place to look for possible improvements is in the display of what the robot is doing: perhaps add lines and arrows of varying length and size indicating the states of the perceptual aspects of the robot's behavior that are influenced by the variations in neural firing rates."

from "basic $9 / premium $19" to "freelancer $19 / studio $29 / agency $99"

cust. segmentation and research (phone calls to CEOs) to figure out what was important for each segment -- perceived value.

[Hm.]
"Amy: Absolutely. You’re not talking about runners up, either. We did not quite hit my revenue estimates for 2011, but we did have $550,000 of revenue and in 2008 we had zero.

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Patrick: High five.

Amy: I’m sorry, what?

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Amy: Not too shabby, right. Exactly. I was hoping for 600 grand and we didn’t quite make it, but that was with a lot of drama where we didn’t work for a lot of that year. I had surgery, I was really sick. That was the three months. That was last year. I had surgery. I was out of commission for six weeks then. We had this hiring and firing drama. That year was screwed and we made $550,000. I’m basically retired and I don’t want to be this way forever.

I really enjoy working and I enjoy having impact and I enjoy touching people’s lives with my software and my course, and I do spend a lot of time on my course. 30×500, that is. We could sit on our asses and rake in $550,000 a year and really work just a couple hours a day on average and we could really cut our overhead."

"The thing that went very, very right with the pricing was anchoring a month's service to the approximate cost of one missed appointment. This is something I come to again and again in copywriting and sales discussions, and it resolves pricing objections for almost everyone I've spoken to. The beautiful thing about that is that it resolves pricing objections at hair salons, who value appointments at $30 to $60, and at cleaning services, who value appointments around $80, and at repair services, which value appointments at around $200, and at health care providers, who value appointments at... oh goodness, you don't even want to know.

Note that the pricing grid attempts to segment most customers by number of appointments they schedule per month. It turns out that *customers largely ignore this and self-segment anyway*, based either on marketing copy or on something as simple as plan names. Most of my revenue comes from customers who *cheerfully overbuy*.

You would honestly not believe how often that happens to my clients and confidants. The simple best reason to avoid fanciful names for pricing plans, or anonymous pricing plans, is that customers *will up-sell themselves* if the name for the plan which best fits their objective needs does not match their self-conception of their business. For example, many employees at Fortune 500 megacorps have reported to a couple businesses of my acquaintance that they needed to upgrade from Hobbyist/Small Business/etc to Enterprise *purely because their manager was uncomfortable describing the company as a Small Business on an expense report*. That's right, you can literally make someone happy by charging them four figures more a year *to avoid a half-instant of embarassment caused by a single word on a document reviewed exactly once*."

"I've heard people mention Gary Drescher's Good and Real as also overlapping with the sequences a fair amount. How do y'all feel about mentioning these two books on the sequences page?"

[geo-loc welcome message]
"Surprise candy sent twice a month, directly from Japan.
Free worldwide shipping, even to Sweden."

Messed up evaluation methods.

"1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in a robot arm, but they're basically using the same hardware. So the influence of software/algorithms in this case is pretty fundamental. There are a lot of papers on improved neural-decoding methods that at first glance appear really dry, boring, not the `sexy' kind of science with huge breakthroughs, but they end up being crucial to good performance as the complexity of the robot grows.

2) One participant was implanted with the electrode array 5 years before the study, and had the injury 10 years before that. Usually the signals don't last that long in monkey models. And we know that your cortex changes with disuse, so it's awesome that they were able to get usable signals so many years later.

What needs to get better are a couple things:

First, these decoders aren't perfect yet. What the Wired article didn't tell you is that the performance for the woman's implant was around 20-50% successful trials (still awesome from a comparison to no interaction)[1].

Second, incorporating sensory feedback is another challenge that is really hard to address, but also very important. Imagine building a robotic controller in which the only information you received about the robot's position was visual. That's the way this works. If we find a reasonable way to mimic sensors of muscle extension (a proxy for joint angle) then we can create more controllable devices."

Most surprising: "The VOR does not depend on visual input and works even in total darkness or when the eyes are closed."

[speaking about 'radicality' vs demonstrating it?]

Comment section: Wilson, Mansell.

re: Tresilian on May 7th: feedforward [that isn't feedforward?] )+ what seems to be the "feedback is too slow" objection [he seems to view 'feedback' as something you get 'after the execution of an event' rather than as a continous, on-going process. Exact phrasing: "feedback of the outcome variable"]

"Here’s an example of the sort of lesson you get. Kasporov recounted a phase in his career when he was so dominant and so experienced that young players tried the strategy of trying very unusual, little-studied variations, in the hope of neutralizing Kasporov’s experience. Turned out to be nearly always a bad move. Kasporov’s conclusion: those unusual variations were unusual and rare for a reason, they mostly suck. When a domain of practice has as long a history as chess does, you can be fairly sure that if some patterns don’t show up much, it’s more likely because people have concluded they don’t work, rather than people having missed innovation opportunities."

referenced in the Wikipedia article on depth perception. Nothing too pertinent at a first glance, except stuff that referred to Gibson.

His earlier work (1950) is referenced in Lipton's "Foundations of the stereoscopic cinema".(1982) (re: textural gradient, tweed jacket.) / (visual world vs visual field)

+ ecology

Most of the demonstrations rely on motion-capture external to the actual robot. There's an example of "map-building" in the latter part of the TED talk. Kumar talks in terms of "execution of motor-commands" (600/s). Ant-like cooperation + monitoring of distance to neighbors.

string similarity

For tracking a single number on a public web page (amount of funds collected on kickstarter, # search results for a given query on Google, temperature of location X reported by a weather site -- and so on)

"It's quite bizarre," Mason said. "You're starting with achiral components — triangles — which undergo Brownian motion and you end up with the spontaneous formation of super-structures that have a handedness or chirality. I would never have anticipated that in a million years."

Entropy is usually thought of as a disordering force, but that doesn't capture its subtler aspects. In this case, when the triangular particles are diffusing and interacting at very high densities on a flat surface, each particle can actually maximize its "wiggle room" by becoming partially ordered into a liquid crystal (a phase of matter between a liquid and a solid) made out of chiral super-structures of triangles.

"We discovered that just two physical ingredients — entropy and particle shape — are enough to cause chirality to appear spontaneously in dense systems," Mason said. "In my 25 years of doing research, I never thought that I would see chirality occur in a system of achiral objects driven by entropic forces."

[approaching sales of ~10k within the first month]

Why aren't you doing 'bundle install --deployment' which totally avoids the issue.

"And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise."

[Scenting: 1. Search query 2. List of pages read.]
"And so when you clicked on the ad for "See Marie's Story," you would get taken to the page about Marie, not the page about Brian. Because obviously you've expressed interest in hearing about Marie's story, not Brian's story. And you wouldn't want to confuse the user by sending them to the wrong page, right? This is called scent. Almost all professional marketers understand it very well. And while start ups don't generally do a great job of doing it in their advertising campaign, it's something that is at least known as an option.

But what if we could take scent one step further than just the landing page? What if we could change the first run experience of the software, their whole experience for the trial, based on what we knew about them based on what creative took them into our page originally, or perhaps what search term took them to our page? This doesn't really make sense for 37signals because obviously you don't have the female version of Highrise versus the male version of Highrise. But it makes sense for a lot of software where there's multiple different ways to use a product, and you can kind of bias the approach towards that product in such a way that it would expose value to the user. Let me give you an example."

[AJAX tour for Appointmentreminder: 50% increase in conversion]

Whether naming and shaming makes you look bad.

"The catchiness of the name "Einstein," mostly in the interior rhyme and spondee stress pattern but also in its similarity to "Frankenstein" (1818), cannot be discounted as a factor in his stardom."

['I see H.' effect on the first top image.]

[First question: Assumption of ('3d') spatial separation being perceived? You can perceive motion -- (recall train station, bus stop, people indp.) -- without perceiving the spatial relationship between ('objects'). Being able to perceive motion does *not* mean that you are able to perceive things as separated objects.]

"What do infants perceive when two objects move together but are separated? Does their common motion unite them, despite their spatial separation?"

"The last time I did a job search, one of the questions I started asking in interviews was “what distinguishes an employee at your company who meets your expectations from someone who is truly outstanding”? If the response was phrased in terms of hours per week, I knew that was not the company for me."

[New take. I still dislike the word 'structure' in this context].
"What is the difference between a swamp and a river? The water in both is exactly the same water, and in both it's behaving the way water behaves. The difference is in the surrounding structure. In exactly the same way humans will behave in the way humans behave, and the difference is in the structure. Systems are very important parts of structure."

Galileo goes to jail..

Recorded during a 1995 Ted Nicholas seminar. Kennedy -- who still seemed to have a bit of hair back then -- illustrates the endorsed mailing + 3-step follow-up sequence using the (mostly made-up?) "Al the plumber" story. Also: Giorgio's Italian Restaurant.

"Primary / Single reason for Response" requires the prospect to be ready to buy. Contrast with "Second reason for marketing": Lead gen --> "Yes, please send me your free report, the 8 steps to get top dollar for your home"

After first mailing, continue to build the relationship / educate them / move them closer to a sale.

Reverse USP question: "Why should I choose to do business with you versus any and every other option available to me?"

Note the dude at the beginning of the QA session. He gives a public testimonial "I've bought all of his books and tapes. He's made me $100,000." Hardly a coincidence.

"But as mentioned above, I can't remember even one thing the book said. I read Collin's and Porras' "Built to Last" over three years ago and still remember core concepts, examples, and referenced points. This book left me with nothing.

It may be the format: quick sound bites probably designed for guys like me who read them on a cross-country flight. I felt good about the purchase in the short term, and can't remember what I read about in the long term.

Ries & Ries "22 immutable laws of branding" employs a similar sound-bite format, and has the same problem. I can't remember one thing the book said about branding, and I read it three times. "

['...according to whom?']
"It's a good read, but there is a page and half that has had a major impact, showing me where I have a huge blindspot in business and how I stop my own progress. This page and a half is possibly the most important material I've read in a book in several years (for me it applies directly).

The author talks about the Fallacy of Planning in a business setting. He ranks plans in this order:

1. Very Good
2. Good
3. Best
4. Fair
5. Poor

Why is Good ahead of Best? Simple, to arrive at Best takes orders of magnitude more planning than Good. Also, who defines Best? How much time is spent creating the Best plan? Will Best stand the test of time? Can everyone agree on Best? Would Good work just as well as Best in the real world? Is Best satisfying the client's need better than a Good plan?

Choosing the "Best" plan leads to Paralysis by Analysis. Good plans allow for quick action and constant improvement. The most successful people in the world have acted on Good plans that they have refined over time. An actionable plan is more successful than a plan that never leaves the drawing board!"

[This is typed rather than copied so typos are most likely mine.]

"Current methods of inferring causal information from correlational data assume that causation implies correlation: that whenever there is a causal connection between two variables, their correlation must be non-zero. More precisely, it is claimed that a zero correlation in the presence of causal influences can only arise by the unlikely chance (a chance with probability zero) of multiple causal connections between the two variables exactly cancelling out. This is the /Faithfulness/ axiom.

We exhibit two counterexamples to this axiom: classes of systems in which Faithfulness is robustly violated. These systems exhibit correlations indistinguishable from zero between variables that are strongly causally connected, and very high correlations between variables that have no direct causal connection, only a connection via causal links between uncorrelated variables. The first example is that of a bounded differentiable variable and its first derivative, or a discrete time series and its first difference. The second example is control systems. In control systems there is a systematic tendency to produce low or zero correlations between variables whose only causal connections are indirect, proceeding via those low-correlation links. That this is even possible may sound paradoxical, but is is inherent in teh way that these systems operate.

All of these counterexamples violate one of [SIC] more of the preconditions required for various published methods of causal inference to be applied. There is thus no contradiction of those results, but a proof of a limitation of their scope.

The counterexamples are not of any artificially contrived sort. On the contrary, the equations defining them and physical systems exemplifying them are commonplace, especially in the life sciences, and to that extent, this must have implications for the conduct of causal analysis in this area."

[...]

"We have seen that control systems display a systematic tendency to violate /Faithfulness/, whether they are at equilibrium or not. Low correlations can be found where there are direct causal effects, and high correlations between variables that are only indirectly causally connected, by paths in which every step shows low correlation. This follows from the basic nature of what a control system does: vary its output to keep its perception equal to its reference. The output automatically takes whatever value it needs to, to prevent the disturbance from affecting the perception. Its very function is to actively destroy the data that current techniques of causal analysis work from."

"First, to a control system there is no such thing as noise. There are just variables that vary, sometimes too fast to keep up with and sometimes in ways that allow maintaining good control. The control system doesn't know or care about waveforms so either everything looks random or nothing does. Noise is just a classification by an observer of waveforms that he can't explain or predict in detail.

Second, causation is a meaningless term unless you simply mean that B is a particular known function of A. As most people use the term, causation is magic: B varies simply because A varied, and not because of any intervening connection between them. The wizard waves his wand (A) and causes the castle to disappear (B). The way statistics is used in the life sciences mostly guarantees that causation is magical: there is no attempt to analyze the situation and work out what mechanisms are behind apparent causation. The whole point of statistics is to find causation where you have no idea of the mechanisms. If you knew the mechanisms, you wouldn't need the statistics. As you show in your writings here, if you just know the statistics, you don't know anything about the mechanisms, either. Drop the idea of causation and those problems disappear, don't they?"

"how is procrastination stopping you from taking action in your life?
"close this page if procrastination is never an issue for you"
[video: secret discovered after years of struggle, drive, $37]
"you're about to learn how to create automatic, unconscious drive"

I can't pinpoint what it is about the author's use of the phrase "the Halo Effect" that irks me.

[CH5: the shittyness is widespread]
"...by isolating the effect of independent variables on dependent variables, these researchers can hope to distill the drivers of company performance"

[What is a 'driver of performance"? What does it mean when you say that X drives Y?]

Corny.

not too interesting at a first glance, revisit to see if there's anything here. "embodiment" is an interesting term.

holy shit

"I skimmed this article."

"Here's the wonderful story of a man who set himself a goal--to live in the country--then figured out a way to earn a GREAT living to support that goal. Lyman Wood is (is he still alive?) a direct marketing/mail order pioneer who spent 60 years or so selling everything from $400 Roto Tillers to PRAYERS by mail. He also worked as an advertising and marketing consultant from his rural home."

Many of the comments on the first page actually seem to be unfounded. The connection to DMA might be a bit of a red flag.

Note how half of the "customers who bought this also bought" books are by Dan Kennedy

[managers vs techs: nobody knows the 'right' answer]
"Businesses routinely spend $$$, $$$$$, and $$$$$$$$$ on things that don't end up working out the way they were planned. They're pretty much OK with that, since they run "portfolio strategies" in terms of directions. Nobody is betting the company on a two-week engagement with me, any more than they bet the company on any particular man-month of engineering time."

"Similarly, this self-help book [Self discipline in 10 days, Bryant] is about as dopey and unscientific as they come. But doing one of the exercises from it years ago destroyed a large insecurity of mine that I was only peripherally aware of. So I probably got more out of it in instrumental terms than I would've gotten out of a chemistry textbook."

"One comment: epicycles included some hard-to-verify assumptions, the main one being that there were transparent rotating "crystalline spheres" onto which littler spheres were mounted, with planets being stuck to the smallest sub-spheres. The number of unverified assumptions probably also contributes to the choice between theories."

"PCT suggests why expertise in a specific domain leads a person to resist a theory that would require a fundamental shift in the foundations of their thinking about that of which they know more than almost anyone else. Would an expert in the astrological effects of the interplay of third level epicycles of Saturn with the retrograde movement of Venus have taken kindly to a Newton telling him that no such epicycles exist? Tim Carey has told some of us that when he used the "Method of Levels" in psychotherapy in Scotland he reduced the waiting list from 15 months to zero, but when he left Scotland, the method was banned and potential practitioners told they would be fired if they used it. It might be informative to run MOL with those who determined it should be banned, might it not?
[...]
PCT has great breadth, and great accuracy and prediction power in the few areas where it has been stress-tested, but in most narrow well-studied areas the existing models provide at least as good predictive accuracy. Why should a person with years of specialized experience want to shift to a novel PCT base for thinking about the narrow topic?

Why should a student take the advice of some one versed in PCT over the advice of many people believed to be authorities on the student's area of interest?"