How To Hypnotise Anyone: Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist
By: The Rogue Hypnotist
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (March 22, 2014)
112 pages

I read How To Hypnotize Anyone because it was listed on the back-of-the-book reading list in Scott Adam’s book Win Bigly. Adams keeps an online version of this persuasion reading list but has since removed this particular volume. In short, hypnosis is probably not what you think it is. It has more to do with controlling where others focus their attention and less to do with people in a trance on a public stage. This has implications for politics, sales, parenting, and every other part of everyday life.

Two of my favorite quotes:

Hypnosis is a natural state. It is not the same as trance. Hypnosis, which is a daft term really but we’re stuck with it, is just a highly focused state –hypnosis is a state of intense absorption or concentration -that is it. Everyone has experienced this state. You can do it with your eyes wide open. If you are doing something that fully absorbs your attention so that you ignore distractions then you have experienced hypnosis. And everyone has. The man who coined the term hypnosis regretted it latter and tried to call it ‘Monoideism’; that is focusing on one thing. Unsurprisingly that nugget of a term never caught on.

If you can evoke an emotion in someone you are accessing unconscious processes and so you are well on your way to hypnotising them. Simply asking someone, ‘How do you feel about x?’ will elicit an unconscious response that bypasses critical thinking. TV reporters frequently ask this kind of question. If you wanted a conscious response you would ask, ‘What do you think about x?’

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Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
By: Annie Duke
Portfolio (February 6, 2018)
288 pages

Thinking In Bets is about just that, making decisions like a poker player would. Annie Duke shows us the difference in binary predictions vs probabilistic ones. In short, for each decision we make, one can have made #1: A good decision, or bad decision, #2: Have good luck, or bad luck, and #3: Have a good outcome, or a bad outcome. The problem here is that many people judge decisions based on outcomes. But the best decision is the best decision, regardless of what happens later.

Two of my favorite quotes:

I fell in love with poker right away. It wasn’t the bright lights of Vegas that lured me in, but the thrill of playing and testing my skills in the basement of a Billings bar named the Crystal Lounge. I had a lot to learn, but I was excited to learn it. My plan was to earn some money during this break from school, stay on the academic path, and continue playing poker as a hobby. My temporary break turned into a twenty-year career as a professional poker player. When I retired from playing in 2012, I had won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet, the WSOP Tournament of Champions, and the NBC National Heads-Up Championship, and earned more than $ 4 million in poker tournaments.

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.” “I’m not sure” does not mean that there is no objective truth. Firestein’s point is, in fact, that acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in executing on our goal to get closer to what is objectively true. To do this, we need to stop treating “I don’t know” and “I’m not sure” like strings of dirty words.

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