Links from the evidence-based movement ...
Still no evidence that gluten sensitivity is real - article.
Use Apllied Predictive Technologies' softtware to manage your field tests and make evidence-based decisions
At Google, the employees review their managers, and this is what it looks like - article
Optimists are able to shape their reality - TED talk by Tali Sharot
Patients, on average, take 75% of the medicines they are prescribed, confusing doctors and putting themselves at risk - paper
Lego bricks, which originally copied another company's product, took many years to eventually find their current form, and included several chance occurences. They were not the result of a single bright idea, but rather years of evolution and accidents. Read the Lego history.
How your brain overrides your ability to think clearly when political beliefs are at stake
How Shopify crowdsources its employee bonuses - short article
A nice infographic by Mulesoft on The Connected Bank
The amazing Kaufman report on venture returns
Jump into the amazing world of Digital Science - and get involved!
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement - business agility for hospitals
Why Triceratops and many other dinosaurs never existed (the way we thought) - TED talk
Michael Shermer's TED talk on "The Pattern Behind Self-Deception."
Sustainability is a big part of business agility - learn how Patagonia invests in sustainable materials
Three ideas that will help us get off antibiotics - excellent article
Simpson's Paradox applied to tennis shows how to lose the points game and win the match - article
Google learns the secret to being a good manager - article
Improve agile team communication with IDoneThis and Slack.
A Brief History of Kanban for Knowledge Work - David Anderson
Pat Leach on loss aversion and portfolio decisionmaking - short essay
The Fundamentals of Decision Quality - video by the Strategic Decisions Group
The Paradox of Skill - an excellent article by Michael Mauboussin
The Myers Briggs test is meaningless - article
Carl Spaetzler on decision quality - YouTube video
New research confirms that micromanaging kills productivity - Inc. article
Skill vs luck in PE and VC investing (hint: skill is rare and impossible to see a-priori) - paper
Prediction markets beat experts at setting odds for FIFA world cup - research paper
An introduction to the Cynefin framework - article by Greg Brougham
Can wine experts distinguish a good wine from a bad wine in a blind taste test? No, says the evidence.
How Bill Gates blew more than $1b on small schools due to poor understanding of statistics - short article
Marginal Revolution - great blog and books on evidence-based statistical reasoning
Marginal Revlution University - amazing courses
OpenFDA gives more people access to data
Why People Insist on Believing Things that Aren't True - New Yorker article
How Zara gathers weak signals, turns them into data, and keeps up with customers - article
Behavioral Finance gets serious at Barclay's - good interview
Questioning a Courtroom Proof of the Uniqueness of Fingerprints - paper by David Kaye
Writers writing in pairs - oh my!
David Siegel, The Culture Deck - on Medium.com
The Poynton traffic experiment - short video
One More Time: How do You Motivate Employees - awesome paper by Frederick Herzberg
Paul Akers on Lean Manufacturing - inspiring 1-hour video
The stories investors tell each other lead to bad investments - Stanford research
Business Insider's list of 58 cognitive biases that make us more wrong that we think we are
If Einstein hadn't been born, both special and general relativity would have been discovered within just a few years (sorry, Einstein fans - Lorenz and Larmor did most of the heavy lifting)
This just in: little evidence for the stereotype of the "trophy wife" - research summary
Terry Kelly: The End of Hierarchy at W. L. Gore - video
Goldilocks Management - a short manifesto on management structure by Dustin Moskowitz of Asana
Vineet Nayar: The End of Leadership - video
The future of education is not in classes but in projects - article on Ecole 42 school in Paris
How the world's best poker players make decisions - Forbes article
Studying gun laws is difficult because the data and science are so weak - as usual, the details matter
The amazing, inspiring, awesome Hubspot Culture Deck - wow!
Long-term weight loss successful in only 5% of population - metastudy summary
What to say - and what not to say - to kids at the dinner table - QZ article
Casey Kerrigan on running forces and shoe design - article
Malcolm Gladwell on The Talent Myth - article
Jerker Denrell on why we're studying the wrong thing, and why learning from example isn't effective - HBR article
Jerker Denrell on why we shouldn't look to successful people for guidance - HBR interview
Dave Logan on Scrum and Tribal Leadership - good stuff on his web site
The ONE thing you can do to make better decisions: don't panic.
Don't manage tail risk, profit from it with 36 South funds.
Excellent visual illusions and explanations - how our brains trick us.
Even the famous Erin Brockovich incident has been “debunked,” Johnson says. “Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. The rate was actually slightly less.” - from the Scientific American blog, "Sorry, but So Far the War on Cancer has been a Bust."
Dave Matheson on portfolio design - important video, well worth watching
Everything You Know is Wrong - great video by Pat Leach of Decision Strategies
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast - fantastic article by Bill Aulet
Aaron Dignan on the new operating system of business - Undercurrent blog (must-read)
Shifting power to employees - a case study of The Great Game of Business
Credit Suisse's "New Normal" investing white paper (it's all about the tails)
How they hire at Spotify, by Henrik Kniberg - blog post
The awesome Spotify engineering culture video, by Henrik Kniberg - excellent
Are electric cars really green? It's complicated, and the details matter, especially how your power grid generates power.
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger try an old strategy: trusting people - article
The only thing wrong with Michael Porter's strategy work and company was that it was all hogwash, and washing big hogs pays very well - article
Learn about The Great Game of Business, a consultancy that helps empower employees.
12 publishers turned down J. K. Rowling's first Harry Potter novel, thinking they knew what the market wanted and didn't want.
The War on Drugs Does not Work and Never Has - London School of Economics study
An average company has 70% of its employees disengaged - study
If you manage by gut feel, read this article on how well that works.
Mark Spitznagel warns that today's stock markets are an illusion - Video interview
Sugar doesn't make kids hyperactive, but it sure gets parents excited - BBC article
The Swindon roundabout - Short video on how to nudge drivers
David Epstein blows away our understanding of sports performance - TED talk
Venture capitalists and the illusion of picking the big winners ahead of time - CB Insights report
The Way We Board Airplanes Makes Absolutely No Sense, and a plain-english explanation.
Can you tell when someone is lying? Yes, but it's not what you think - New Yorker article
Mindvalley's amazing corporate culture, a TEDx talk by Vishen Lakhiani
How driving "works" in Addis Ababa - video
Positivity theory trashed by a graduate student - article
Danish companies have simple rules for building happiness in - article
The Music Lab experiment explained in plain english - NYTimes Magazine article
The secret of a Stradivarius violin: it's all in your mind, not in your ears - study
Is Gluten the New Candida? - if you're on a gluten-free diet, i have good news for you.
World Blu's 2014 list of democratic companies - is your company on the list?
IBM's Roberto Henriquez hacks crowdfunding for internal projects - BBC report
Jabe Bloom's slide deck for Kanban North America - not to be missed
"Through a long process of trial and error, I have come to believe strongly in the process of trial and error." - David Siegel
An experiment with monkeys shows that we are all easily conditioned
Venture capitalists strongly favor good-looking males - study
Carol Dweck's research on fixed vs growth mindset - Brainpickings
Mindfulness = better decisionmaking, even for people who are too busy to meditate - HBR blog
Loomio - the open source collaborative decisionmaking tool
The M-Prize competition winners - hacking work, reinventing management
Ten common cancer myths debunked - ScienceBlog
Helping your kids with their homework won't help them with school - new study
That little voice in your head that says you can multitask? It's wrong. - article
Business agility fans - read all of Michael Mauboussin's books, please.
Dave Matheson's excellent class on product/project portfolio design - Stanford video
The Case Against Grades - paper by Alfie Kohn
Joshua Kerievsky on the difference between lean (strategy) and agile (tactics) - video
Got milk? You don't need it, and it's bad for the environment.
Could our gut biomes be the key to understanding the obesity epidemic? - research paper
The secret to becoming a successful writer is ... luck - Salon.com article
Nuclear Economics - A stunning display of clear thinking by William Sharpe
Custom orthotics probably don't help - quick summary
"If you're not meeting your sales quotas, you're not listening hard enough." - David Siegel
Releasing products at Facebook - less planning, more coding.
Lego Cuusoo - a market powered by customers that turns popular creations into products.
How Zara uses algorithms to follow fast, rather than predict - BusinessWeek
The Myth of Common Sense, an SFI lecture by Duncan Watts - YouTube
Thomas Lovejoy presents evidence of climate change at SFI - YouTube
Gary Taubes: Why are we all so confused about nutrition? Because we don't know.
Another big study casts doubt on the effectiveness of mamography - NY Times
That build up of lactic acid in your muscles when you exercise? It's a myth.
Facebook bootcamp: move fast and break things - article
Dave Snowden on Tacit Knowledge - a 35-minute video worth watching to the end
Model your priorities to optimize your feature backlog - good post on agile methods
We need more like this: The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy
Anne Milgram on applying statistical analytics and heuristics to law enforcement - TED talk
"Ten percent of American businesses fail every year." - Tim Harford
How to Let 999 Flowers die - excellent article by Freek Vermeulen in S + B
Bob Sutton on why hierarchies aren't necessarily evil - article
Build a democratic workplace: join Worldblu.org
The Dunning-Kruger effect explained - article
Dan Pink talks about hacking HR - interview with Polly LaBarre
Toyota's paradox: design slower to cycle faster - article
Microchip Technology gets rid of sales commissions and loves it - Daniel Pink article on HBR
Choosing Wisely - helping prevent unnecessary tests and procedures in health care
Squeezed: What You Don't Know about Orange Juice - book
Measuring CEO overconfidence in Mergers and Acquisitions - paper
Risk and Resilience - a nice short video by Dave Snowden
Don't study success without studying failure - paper by Jerker Denrell
Google buys private company Nest; price of public co NEST surges - Business Insider
Menlo Innovations, Putting the Joy into Work - Forbes article
Does consumer genetic testing tell us anything? Probably not - New York Times article
Your mother tongue affects what you remember - paper
The (causative) relationship between salt and hypertension was largely made up - says Gary Taubes
How the algorithms on Wall Street actually work - video (not for the squeamish)
Zappos goes completely flat, embraces Holacracy.
"The facts don't know whose side they're on." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
Winning a silver medal sucks, but bronze is epicly awesome.
"My thesis for some time has been that the people doing the work know better how to do their jobs than the leaders demanding the work from their employees." - Philip Foster, of MaximumChange.com
Making Strategy Work, by Lawrence G. Hrebiniak, shows that while strategy is important; execution is more important.
How many people die from misdiagnosis and medical error? Many more than we thought.
Organic cow's milk still not more healthy, but definitely more expensive.
Has Warren Buffet been able to beat the S&P mid-cap index since 2000? No, says SeekingAlpha.
There's a vial of polywater proudly displayed in the museum of wrongology. - great story of scientific discovery
"Optimism is easy. Skepticism is hard." - David Siegel
Science is broken - says the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine
Is the economy usually in equilibrium? No, says W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute - paper
The Ghost Exchange - excellent documentary on our skewed electronic stock markets
Carl Sagan's final interview with Charlie Rose (1996) - video, 45 min
Alphabetic bias in stock valuations and trading frequencies - paper
People Don't Click - by David Siegel on Medium.com
Why I can't multitask, and neither can you. - article
Wikistrat - the first Massively Multiplayer Online Consulting Company!!
The lifespan of public companies is getting shorter and shorter - MIT Review
Another nail in the coffin of getting regular checkups - metastudy
Six big documentaries that were fabricated - another great piece by Cracked.com
Measuring hospital safety is hard, but important (but hard). - article
A 40-hour workweek, plus pets and babies in the office? Yes. - Menlo Innovations leads the way
What all the dead apps tell us - they help us set our Bayesian priors.
A retired police captain debunks the myth of the war on drugs - short video on Upworthy
Are you Pretotyping? Watch the Google Talk to learn more (hint: testing is dead).
“A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.” - Albert Einstein
Do drug prescription rates vary across regions of the US? Yes. Significantly.
Functional foods, a $200b+ market, is "21st century quackery" - paper
The strongest predictor of successful suicide is gun ownership. - Harvard study
VALS - the personal-values database that helps understand consumers.
Whoops, there goes the paleo diet theory, and the paleontologists agree.
Regardless of the stories they tell, VCs don't achieve alpha better than chance would predict.
The Story of the Umbrella Man - a New York Times Documentary (MUST SEE).
Ryan Holiday convinces media to buy BS stories he made up - video
Should people get asymptomatic wisdom teeth removed? Probably not, according to several studies.
40 Maps that Help Make Sense of the World - excellent infographics
Julia Galef: Rationality and the Future - video
How is Brent James singlehandedly improving health care? By doing experiments.
The Dartmouth Atlas documents regional differences in US healthcare.
Regardless of what we say or think, we vote for the better looking or taller candidate.
Why Americans refrigerate their eggs and Europeans don't - they have to.
Mindfulness ... there's an app for that.
Elon Musk shows when to use evidence and when to apply sheer conviction - a story of leadership on Quora
The Santa Fe Institute shows how business agility affects entrepreneurship - nice post by John Chisholm.
Debunking the myth of Mother Theresa - a new research paper from University of Montreal
Stormpulse helps business decisionmakers quantify extreme weather risk.
Thoughtworks abolishes sales commissions and gets better results.
Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology - why the next flash crash could wipe out your retirement savings.
“Our bravest and best lessons are not learned through success, but through misadventure.” - Amos Bronson Alcott
Recent notes on barefoot running - the evidence is not in yet; beware of claims.
Pymetrics applies learnings from neuroscience to the interview process.
The MIX HR hackathon report - excellent approach to innovating in a fossilized industry.
The Century of the Self - one of the most informative 4 hours you'll ever spend. Do not miss. Amazing.
Matthew Taylor on 21st Century Enlightenment - RSA Animate video
Elizabeth Loftus explains how easy it is to implant false memories - TED talk
Does increased schooling lead to increased economic growth? - careful examinations of cause and effect by Lant Pritchett
"It's only by measuring that we can cross the river of myths:" - another awesome video by Hans Rosling
Sutton and Pfeffer on Evidence-Based Management - NY Times article
Agile for Executives - a fantastic half-day training course by ThoughtWorks
"The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed." - Daniel Kahneman
The evidence against Christopher Columbus as a hero - should we have a national holiday honoring him?
Sleep studies reveal cognitive deficits - what NASA has learned about sleep and performance
Peter Attia on why we need rational nutrition research - video series on obesity
Nassim Taleb testifies before congress on tail risks in the banking system - video
"'Scientific certainty' is a conflict in terms." - David Siegel
Strategic Thinking and Decisionmaking - a webinar by Paul Shoemaker
Learn about p-hacking, how statistical significance is manipulated - by Neurobonkers
When Science Doesn't Support Our Beliefs - a Libertarian skeptic looks at the evidence
"When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course." - Peter Drucker
Red Teams turned up massive security problems in FAA before 9/11 and the evidence was ignored - testimony before congress by Bogdan Dzakovic.
"Saying “I don’t know” is probably one of the sharpest tools in your toolbox. " - David Siegel
World Bank Study: Role of School Improvement in Economic Development - debunking myths about education.
Scrum, a Management Framework - reference card by Michael James
Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials - research from the UK "Nudge" unit.
More evidence that the War on Drugs was based on convenient "facts," not true evidence.
"An anecdote should be used only to illustrate a point, not to prove a point." - Douglas Hubbard
Mediocre Labs launches to try new experiments in online retail shopping.
"If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate under your default settings - then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options." - David Foster Wallace
How Google Uses Data to Hire - more on evidence-based hiring at Google
Decision Making - excellent video by Stanford and SDG
Executive Education-Linking Scenario Planning and Decision Making - excellent video by Dr. Alexandar Van de Putte
How We Hire - Learn from Google how to avoid biases in hiring.
How to Design Business Experiments - Harvard Business Review article by Thomas Davenport
An Open Letter to the Board of J. C. Penney - a short case study by David Siegel
Nassim Taleb to give a 2-day business seminar in Boston, Nov 4 & 5
Brain imaging debunks left brain/right brain myth
Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discussion - video
The Obesity Era - excellent article by David Berreby
Routine Health Check-Ups Provide No Measurable Health Benefit - CBS article
"It is a great strength of Homo sapiens that we can, better than any other species in the world, learn to model the unseen. It is also one of our great weak points. Humans often believe in things that are not only unseen but unreal." - Eliezer Yudkowski
Ten Big Companies that Promote Employee Meditation - article.
An Open Letter to the Board at Apple - by David Siegel, published on Forbes.com, December, 2012.
Malcolm Gladwell portrait of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the New Yorker, 2002.
The Princeton MusicLab experiment that investigates how random popular music is and shows the tyranny of the popular vote.
Prostate Cancer for Marketers - What should you do if you get diagnosed for prostate cancer? Nothing, according to David Siegel, who explains why 23andMe video ads are misleading the public.
Understanding is a Poor Substitute for Convexity - in this essay, Nassim Taleb argues that what makes trial and error work is the asymmetry between the cost of a single trial and the benefit of a big discovery.
The Allure of Essentialism Distorts Business Writing - Sam McNerny on why business gurus keep getting it wrong.
Overconfidence as a Cause of Diagnostic Error in Medicine - a technical paper showing how doctors' egos affect outcomes. Tip: go with the doctor who is quiet, reserved, a bit unsure, and qualifies statements.
The Placebo Effect, by David Siegel on Medium.com
Surprises are the New Normal; Resilience is the New Skill - by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Pro Golfers' Loss Bias - how the top tour pros give up $1.2m each year due to a psychological bias.
Do Clinical Trials Work? - an excellent article on the drug industry's search for statistical significance.
Everything We Thought We Knew About Running Shoes is Wrong - Large trials provide good evidence for getting rid of "motion control" running shoes.
Drug Bless America - visual evidence that the War on Drugs has backfired.
The House I Live In - an important documentary on the history and failure of the drug wars in the US. Clue: drugs are now more plentiful, potent, and cheaper than ever before.
Do antidepressants work? - most don't, but it's complicated.
Larry Smarr's TedMed talk on his own microbiome - cutting edge research done on his own body.
War on Cancer: Who's Winning? Otis Brawley explains at TedMed
American Way of Birth: Costliest in the World - and the worst outcomes among developed countries.
ABC racial profiling experiment - watching this for 10 minutes will convince you that we are all racially biased.
Robert Parker Unable to Identify Wines He Has Praised - the ruthless business of wine rating and hero worship meets its match in a blind tasting.
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