Imagine eating the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.
That’s what half the Irish population did in the early 1800s. The poor ate almost exclusively potatoes, with the potato consumption of a typical farm worker exceeding a whopping 6 pounds a day.
As a young boy growing up in Istanbul, my vision of America was put together from an eclectic set of American TV shows selected for translation to Turkish.
America’s ambassadors to Turkey included Cousin Larry in Perfect Strangers, the Tanner family in ALF, and Al Bundy in Married with Children (which strongly reinforced every stereotype that people ever had about Americans).
Think back on the failures you’ve had in your life.
If you’re like most people, you’ll picture the bad outcomes—the business that never took off, the penalty kick you missed, or the job interview you bombed. Poker players, as Annie Duke explains in Thinking in Bets, refer to this tendency to “equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome” as “resulting.” But, as Duke argues, the quality of the input isn’t the same as the quality of the output.
If a mathematician hadn’t followed his contrarian instincts, World War II may have turned out differently.
Abraham Wald was born in Hungary, got his Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Vienna, and immigrated to the United States after the Nazis invaded Austria. During World War II, he worked for the Statistical Research Group, which was tasked with applying math to solve various problems that came up during the war.
