Friends, addictive foods, and funny social effects
Friends, addictive foods, and funny social effects
1st of August 2024
Hello,
Here's the best of what I have published on Medium (free to access from this email):
Mastering the Art of Prioritizing Between Work, Money, and Fun
How to Become a Full Stack Marketer In 6 Months Without a Marketing Background
Here's the cool stuff I have learned:
A $2.8k Dior bag costs $57 to manufacture.
Pre-purchase anxiety is the anxiety buyers go through before buying a product (online) because they don’t know if the product will suit them or not.
Europe is launching Wero, a payment system helping you transfer money based on phone numbers.
Addictive food is addictive because companies spend millions making sure that everything, from the taste to the smell to the noise, pleases the brain.
Google’s Ngram is a database that helps you visualize the frequency of words in books across time.
ITER is an international fusion reactor research project located in the south of France. It’s one of the biggest and hardest technological projects to date.
The availability cascade is a concept from the Turkish economist Timur Kuran which designates the phenomenon whereas an idea quickly spreads in a self-reinforcing manner. It explains viral trends.
The genetic fallacy designates the bias in which arguments are validated or not based on their source and not on their content.
The spotlight effect is the psychological phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are.
The Veblen effect designates the phenomenon during which demand for a product increases as the price increases. LVMH is famous for increasing the price of the products sold by the companies it acquires.
Godwin’s law expresses that the chance of being compared to the worst of human beings increases as a conversation lasts.
From Nassim Taleb: the Khazar hypothesis is a theory suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Khazars, a Turkic group that converted to Judaism in the 6th or 7th century. Wikipedia says it’s been discredited but Taleb tweeted a study seeming to support the theory.
Obesity negatively impacts offsprings’ mental health.
The UK’s sugar tax led to a nearly 50% reduction in children’s added sugar intake from sodas and other soft drinks.
Congenital iodine deficiency syndrome, also known as cretinism, was a disease caused by the lack of iodine in the diet, mainly impacting inhabitants of regions far from the sea. It later gave birth to the French expression “crétin des Alpes”.
Rob Henderson wrote an interesting article on how important friends are for happiness and why you should make an effort to reach out to them more often. Living closer to your friends also makes you happier.
Speaking of which, your enemies have more enemies than you do. It’s the enmity paradox.
There’s a correlation between how people look and who they vote for.
Divorce rates increase when women’s salaries become higher than their husbands’.
Taking baking soda before doing sports improves your endurance.
10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023.
The Chicago police used big data to predict people who were most at risk of being victims of crime. Out of the 500 people they profiled, 13% were victims in the next 18 months. You can read why here.
I found four nice infographics I thought you should see.
Take care.
Aure :)