Participants attempted to replicate 100 experimental and correlational psychology studies that had been published in three prominent psychology journals. The results — widely reported in the media — were sobering. Just 39 of the studies were successfully replicated (Science, 2015). Psychology, it seemed, had a credibility problem.

The paradox of money is that in order to convey value, it needs to have no value of its own. In order for it to be transferred universally across any imaginable desire, it needs to be formless and empty of any meaning. It is only through its abstract nature that it can create a web of value between everything in the material world, and solidify the story we tell each other about its significance.

We all love our shiny apps, even when they’re sealed as tight as a Moon base. But put all the closed apps in the world together and you have a pile of apps. Put all the Web pages together and you have a new world. Web pages are about connecting. Apps are about control. As we move from the Web to an app-based world, we lose the commons we were building together. In the Kingdom of Apps, we are users, not makers. Every new page makes the Web bigger. Every new link makes the Web richer. Every new app gives us something else to do on the bus.

Games, as I often say on this blog, are compelling because they are simpler, fairer and more empowering than real life. They are simpler because the levers for succeeding are more immediate to understand. They are fairer because the results from manipulating those levers (taking action) are clear and predictable. And they are more empowering because the player is able to effect significant change in the game world.

When my mind is at its quietest – for example, drinking coffee early in the morning, before the four-year-old wakes up – things are liable to feel different. In such moments of relaxed concentration, it seems clear to me that my intentions and choices, like all my other thoughts and emotions, arise unbidden in my awareness. There’s no sense in which it feels like I’m their author. Why do I put down my coffee mug and head to the shower at the exact moment I do so? Because the intention to do so pops up, caused, no doubt, by all sorts of activity in my brain – but activity that lies outside my understanding, let alone my command. And it’s exactly the same when it comes to those weightier decisions that seem to express something profound about the kind of person I am: whether to attend the funeral of a certain relative, say, or which of two incompatible career opportunities to pursue. I can spend hours or even days engaged in what I tell myself is “reaching a decision” about those, when what I’m really doing, if I’m honest, is just vacillating between options – until at some unpredictable moment, or when an external deadline forces the issue, the decision to commit to one path or another simply arises.

Laplace’s demon, and his argument went as follows: if some hypothetical ultra-intelligent being – or demon – could somehow know the position of every atom in the universe at a single point in time, along with all the laws that governed their interactions, it could predict the future in its entirety. There would be nothing it couldn’t know about the world 100 or 1,000 years hence, down to the slightest quiver of a sparrow’s wing. You might think you made a free choice to marry your partner, or choose a salad with your meal rather than chips; but in fact Laplace’s demon would have known it all along, by extrapolating out along the endless chain of causes. “For such an intellect,” Laplace said, “nothing could be uncertain, and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.”It’s true that since Laplace’s day, findings in quantum physics have indicated that some events, at the level of atoms and electrons, are genuinely random, which means they would be impossible to predict in advance, even by some hypothetical megabrain. But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings. And in any case, there’s no more freedom in being subject to the random behaviours of electrons than there is in being the slave of predetermined causal laws. Either way, something other than your own free will seems to be pulling your strings.

The zombie scenario goes as follows: imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this – as opposed to a groaning, blood-spattered walking corpse from a movie – is what philosophers mean by a “zombie”.Such non-conscious humanoids don’t exist, of course. (Or perhaps it would be better to say that I know I’m not one, anyhow; I could never know for certain that you aren’t.) But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could. Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside. As Chalmers explained: “I’m talking to you now, and I can see how you’re behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly what’s going on in your brain – yet it seems it could be consistent with all that evidence that you have no consciousness at all.” If you were approached by me and my doppelgänger, not knowing which was which, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell us apart. And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical ato

My key takeaways: Investing partners (LPs) are usually sector specific for 2-7 years What you don't learn in B-school: *Critical thinking* - Identify secular trends in the sector/ regulations - Post-mortem: I let this opportunity go. What assumptions that I had made didn't pan out - Keep learning: You can't beat the herd/ curve if you follow the herd/ unless you are at the top of the curve - Identify the lead thinkers in each sector; others have derivative thoughts - Create time for reflection - Read about creativity and innovation *Communication skills* needed to convince voting partners, CEOs to do what you want them to - Speak sensibly and logically off-the-cuff. e.g. Bill Clinton - Practice. Steve Jobs practised 400 times - Get feedback - Anticipate the likely questions - Tailor to audience and topic. US, EUR, India differ widely. Take cultural training - First few slides/ minutes are crucial - You learn about PNL managing a large company, in PE you also focus on balance sheets - Par for the course: spreadsheet modelling, what-if analysis, sensitivity analysis

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