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This summer, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman became co-owners of Australia’s three-time champion SailGP team. Days earlier, Anne Hathaway joined a female-led consortium purchasing Italy’s team for around $45 million. Kylian Mbappé has bought into France’s squad, while Sebastian Vettel, Deontay Wilder, and DeAndre Hopkins have each acquired stakes in teams. So, what’s drawing A-list celebrities away from traditional sports properties and toward a sailing league that’s only been around for six years? The answer lies in how SailGP has cracked a code that eluded the sport for centuries. What Russell Coutts, the league’s CEO and cofounder, described as once being white triangles on a blue background racing far away from shore now looks more like Formula 1 on water. [Photo: SailGP] Flying boats, record speeds Forget everything you think you know about sailboats. SailGP’s F50 catamarans fly above the water on hydrofoilsunderwater wings that lift the hulls completely out of the waterat speeds exceeding 100 kilometers per hour. That’s 62 mph. On water. Powered only by wind. Most powerboats can’t even keep up. The boats don’t use traditional sails. Instead, the 50-foot boats have rigid wings built like airplane wings turned vertical, standing up to 80 feet tall. “This produces what we, in engineering terms, call a lift coefficient that is three times higher than a thin membrane sail,” Coutts explains. Translation: They catch wind more efficiently than conventional sails, generating massive thrust even in light conditions. When a boat moves forward, it creates its own windjust like how your hand feels resistance when you stick it out a car window. By angling these high-efficiency wings correctly, F50s use both the actual wind and the wind they create through their own speed to go more than three times faster than the wind itself. [Photo: SailGP] Nine-minute races and $80 tickets Traditional sailing races stretched for hours with boats barely visible from shore. SailGP races last nine to 12 minutes and feature four races per day: short, intense bursts with enough time between heats for a bathroom break and a cocktail. The shorter race format enables something traditional sailing never could: close-to-shore competition in iconic harbors. Events happen in places like Sydney Harbor, New York Harbor, and San Francisco Bay. Stadium seating sells out weeks in advance. Auckland and Portsmouth each drew 25,000 ticketed fans. Tickets start at $80 for waterfront grandstand seatsaccessible pricing that brings the sport to a far broader audience than the yacht club exclusivity of traditional sailing. Fans can watch from grandstands or rent a boat and watch from the water. It’s part race, part waterfront festival. The spectacle translates to screens, too. Augmented reality graphics superimposed on the water create a visible playing field with boundaries, like the yard markers on a football field. Before this, even dedicated sailing fans struggled to follow races on TV. Now, even the most casual fan can understand who’s winning and why. Since launching in 2019, viewership has reached 200 million per season across 212 territories globally. CBS attracted 1.78 million viewers for its Spain Sail Grand Prix broadcastthe largest audience for a sailing event in the U.S. in 30 yearsexceeding what some regular-season NHL games pull. More recently, on November 23, CBS’s broadcast of The Race to Abu Dhabi drew 3.47 million viewers, breaking the previous U.S. viewership record for a sailing event established by the 1992 America’s Cup on ABC. “We were pleasantly surprised to find that the appeal to the racing fan was identical to the appeal to the avid sailing fan,” Coutts recalls. “We’ve got confidence now that the product stands up.” [Photo: SailGP] From money pit to money maker In 2019, Coutts and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison launched SailGP with one deceptively simple innovation: a regular season. For decades, professional sailing meant wealthy enthusiasts funding expensive hobbies with no return. The America’s Cupsailing’s premier event for 174 yearsexemplified the broken model. Imagine if the Super Bowl happened once every four years with no regular season in between. No predictable schedule. No way for athletes to plan or build a career. That’s been the America’s Cup. Sponsors couldn’t justify the investment. Broadcasters couldn’t build programming around it. Teams couldn’t make it profitable. “It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?” says Jimmy Spithill, CEO and co-owner of the Red Bull Italy SailGP Team. “But whether you’re an athlete, a sponsor, or a broadcasterif it wasn’t a regular season, how could you plan?” Upon founding, Ellison committed to funding the league for five years. But the transformation happened faster than anyone expected. Teams that couldn’t be sold in 2019 now command $60 to $70 million valuations. Four of the league&8217;s 12 teams are already profitablea milestone that took the WNBA 13 years to achieve and that Wrexham, Reynolds’ soccer team, still hasn’t reached. In traditional sailing, teams burned millions on secret boat development that never stopped. That game is over. The business model prevents this money pit problem. All teams race identical boats. All performance data is completely sharedboat telemetry, race strategies, even engineering insights. When the league develops an upgradenew hydrofoils, better control systemsevery team gets it simultaneously. There is no buying wins. “Everyone’s on the same equipment,” Spithill says. “So no one has a technical advantage.” [Photo: SailGP] The investment thesis that sold Hollywood When Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo evaluated investing in the Red Bull Italy team, he saw something bigger than sailing. The Italian luxury brand executive who spent years at Giorgio Armani and Moncler recognized a familiar pattern. “I saw a growing sport with an incredible heritage because of the America’s Cup,” he says. “Millions of fans following this through generations, but no competition on a weekly or monthly base.” Passi de Preposulo recognized the pattern: a legacy sport with millions of fans but no consistent competition to followexactly the gap SailGP’s regular season format filled. But he also saw that the business model offers investment advantages impossible in more mature leagues. National team scarcityone per country, capped at around 20 teams totalcreates inherent value. Buying a $60 million SailGP team gives you a significantly larger ownership stake and more governance rights than putting that same money into a $5 billion NFL franchise. Men and women race together on the same boatsunusual in professional sportsdoubling the target audience and appealing to the increasing pool of investors backing women’s sports. Teams operate on standard sports economics: sponsorship, broadcast revenue shares, and licensing. But only six years in, most revenue streams remain undeveloped. The four profitable teams achieved this through sponsorship alone. Cash cows like broadcast rights and licensing represent pure upside. Team valuations reflect this trajectory. “In season three, you could have bought a team for $20 million,” Coutts says. “Now you’re not going to buy a team for under $70.” [Photo: SailGP] Scaling SailGP From six teams and five events in 2019, SailGP now runs 12 teams across 12 events. The target: 20-plus events annually, matching Formula 1’s 24. Teams 13 and 14 are already sold for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, and the league projects over $200 million in annual revenue by season’s end, which culminates this weekend with the Grand Final in Abu Dhabi, where the top three teams will compete for a $2 million prize. Rolex signed a 10-year title sponsorship, renaming the competition the Rolex SailGP Championship. Its by far the biggest partnership in sailing, Coutts says. Amazon, Tommy Hilfiger, and T-Mobile have also joined as team sponsors. Events now generate an average $26.2 million in economic impact for host citiesquadruple the $6.8 million from Season 1, according to SailGP. For context, Formula 1 races generate $200 to $400 million. The celebrity investment impact is measurable. Market research firm YouGov tracks “buzz scores”a measure of whether people are hearing positive or negative things about a brand. In Australia, SailGP scores jumped from 22.0 to 26.3 in two weeks following the Reynolds and Jackman announcement. France saw similar lifts after Mbappé’s investment. For Reynolds, SailGP represents another portfolio expansion. His Maximum Effort Investments backs Wrexham AFC, Club Necaxa, La Equidad, and Alpine F1. His Wrexham successtransforming an obscure Welsh soccer club through marketing genius and storytellingoffers a template as SailGP looks to continue its growth, both in investment and global audience. “The fact that we can get that sort of [celebrity] involvement in one of the teams is amazing,” Coutts says. “And they’ll have some fun with it too, which is what it’s all about.”
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E-Commerce
The U.S. government has caused massive food waste during President Donald Trumps second term. Policies such as immigration raids, tariff changes, and temporary and permanent cuts to food assistance programs have left farmers short of workers and money, food rotting in fields and warehouses, and millions of Americans hungry. And that doesnt even include the administrations actual destruction of edible food. The U.S. government estimates that more than 47 million people in America dont have enough food to eateven with federal and state governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on programs to help them. Yet, huge amounts of foodon average in the U.S., as much as 40% of itrots before being eaten. That amount is equivalent to 120 billion meals a year: more than twice as many meals as would be needed to feed those 47 million hungry Americans three times a day for an entire year. This colossal waste has enormous economic costs and renders useless all the water and resources used to grow the food. In addition, as it rots, the wasted food emits in the U.S. alone over four million metric tons of methanea heat-trapping greenhouse gas. As a scholar of wasted food, I have watched this problem worsen since Trump began his second term in January 2025. Despite this administrations claim of streamlining the government to make its operations more efficient, a range of recent federal policies have, in fact, exacerbated food wastage. Immigration policy Supplying fresh foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and dairy, requires skilled workers on tight timelines to ensure ripeness, freshness, and high quality. The Trump administrations widespread efforts to arrest and deport immigrants have sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol, and other agencies into hundreds of agricultural fields, meat processing plants, and food production and distribution sites. Supported by billions of taxpayer dollars, they have arrested thousands of food workers and farmworkerswith lethal consequences at times. Dozens of raids have not only violated immigrants human rights and torn families apart: They have jeopardized the national food supply. Farmworkers already work physically hard jobs for low wages. In legitimate fear for their lives and liberty, reports indicate that in some places 70% of people harvesting, processing, and distributing food stopped showing up to work by mid-2025. News reports have identified many instances where crops have been left to rot in abandoned fields. Even the U.S. Department of Labor declared in October 2025 that aggressive farm raids drive farmworkers into hiding, leave substantial amounts of food unharvested and thus pose a risk of supply shock-induced food shortages. Food specially formulated to feed starving children is marked for disposal in a U.S. government warehouse in July 2025. [Photo: Stephen B. Morton for The Washington Post via Getty Images] Foreign aid cuts When the Trump administration all but shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development in early 2025, the agency had 500 tons of ready-to-eat, high-energy biscuits worth US$800,000, stored to distribute to starving people around the world who had been displaced by violence or natural disasters. With no staff to distribute the biscuits, they expired while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai. Incinerating the out-of-date biscuits reportedly cost an additional $125,000. An additional 70,000 tons of USAID fod aid may also have been destroyed. Tariffs In the late 20th century, as globalized trade patterns grew, U.S. farmers struggled with agricultural prices below their production costs. Yet tariffs in the first Trump administration did not protect small farms. And the tariffs imposed in early 2025, after Trump regained the White House, severed U.S. soybean trade with China for months. Meanwhile, theres nowhere to store the mountains of soybeans. An October 2025 agreement may resume some activity, but at lower price levels and a slower pace than before, as China looks to Brazil and Argentina to meet its vast demand. Though the soybeans were intended to feed the Chinese pig industry, not humans, the specter of waste looms both in terms of the potential spoilage of soybeans and the actual human food that could have been grown in their place. Mature soybeans sit unharvested in an Indiana field in October 2025. [Photo: Jeremy Hogan/Getty Images] Other efforts lead to more waste Since taking office, the second Trump administration has taken many steps aimed at efficiency that actually boosted food waste. Mass firings of food safety personnel risks even more outbreaks of foodborne diseases, tainted imports, and agricultural pathogenswhich can erupt into crises requiring mass destruction, for instance, of nearly 35,000 turkeys with bird flu in Utah. In addition, the administration canceled a popular program that helped schools and food banks buy food from local farmers, though many of the crops had already been planted when the cancellation announcement was made. That food had to find new buyers or risk being wasted, too. And the farmers were unable to count on a key revenue source to keep their farms afloat. Also, the administration slashed funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helped food producers, restaurants, and households recover from disastersincluding restoring power to food-storage refrigeration. The fall 2025 government shutdown left the governments major food aid program, SNAP, in limbo for weeks, derailing communities ability to meet their basic needs. Grocers, who benefit substantially from SNAP funds, announced discounts for SNAP recipientsto help them afford food and to keep food supplies moving before they rotted. The Department of Agriculture ordered them not to, saying SNAP customers must pay the same prices as other customers. Food waste did not start with the Trump administration. But the administrations policiesthough they claim to be seeking efficiencyhave compounded voluminous waste at a time of growing need. This Thanksgiving, think about wasted foodas a problem, and as a symptom of larger problems. American University School of International Service masters student Laurel Levin contributed to the writing of this article. Tevis Garrett Graddy-Lovelace is a provost associate professor of environment, development and health at the American University School of International Service. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Three years ago, if someone needed to fix a leaky faucet or understand inflation, they usually did one of three things: typed the question into Google, searched YouTube for a how-to video or shouted desperately at Alexa for help. Today, millions of people start with a different approach: They open ChatGPT and just ask. Im a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries. As a scholar who studies information retrieval, I see that this shift of the tool people reach for first for finding information is at the heart of how ChatGPT has changed everyday technology use. Change in searching The biggest change isnt that other tools have vanished. Its that ChatGPT has become the new front door to information. Within months of its introduction on Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT had 100 million weekly users. By late 2025, that figure had grown to 800 million. That makes it one of the most widely used consumer technologies on the planet. Surveys show that this use isnt just curiosityit reflects a real change in behavior. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, roughly double the share found in 2023. Among adults under 30, a clear majority (58%) have tried it. An AP-NORC poll reports that about 60% of U.S. adults who use AI say they use it to search for information, making this the most common AI use case. The number rises to 74% for the under-30 crowd. Traditional search engines are still the backbone of the online information ecosystem, but the kind of searching people do has shifted in measurable ways since ChatGPT entered the scene. People are changing which tool they reach for first. For years, Google was the default for everything from how to reset my router to explain the debt ceiling. These basic informational queries made up a huge portion of search traffic. But these quick, clarifying, everyday what does this mean questions are the ones ChatGPT now answers faster and more cleanly than a page of links. And people have noticed. A 2025 U.S. consumer survey found that 55% of respondents now use OpenAIs ChatGPT or Googles Gemini AI chatbots about tasks they previously would have asked Google search to help them with, with even higher usage figures for the U.K. Another analysis of more than 1 billion search sessions found that traffic from generative AI platforms is growing 165 times faster than traditional searches, and about 13 million U.S. adults have already made generative AI their go-to tool for online discovery. This doesnt mean people have stopped Googling, but it means ChatGPT has peeled off the kinds of questions for which users want a direct explanation instead of a list of links. Curious about a policy update? Need a definition? Want a polite way to respond to an uncomfortable email? ChatGPT is faster, feels more conversational and feels more definitive. At the same time, Google isnt standing still. Its search results look different than they did three years ago because Google started weaving its AI system Gemini directly into the top of the page. The AI Overview summaries that appear above traditional search links now instantly answer many simple questionssometimes accurately, sometimes less so. But either way, many people never scroll past that AI-generated snapshot. This fact combined with the impact of ChatGPT are the reasons the number of zero-click searches has surged. One report using Similarweb data found that traffic from Google to news sites fell from over 2.3 billion visits in mid-2024 to under 1.7 billion in May 2025, while the share of news-related searches ending in zero clicks jumped from 56% to 69% in one year. Google search excels at pointing to a wide range of sources and perspectives, but the results can feel cluttered and designed more for clicks than clarity. ChatGPT, by contrast, delivers a more focused and conversational response that prioritizes explanation over ranking. The ChatGPT response can lack the source transparency and multiple viewpoints often found in a Google search. In terms of accuracy, both tools can occasionally get it wrong. Googles strength lies in letting users cross-check multiple sources, while ChatGPTs accuracy depends heavily on the quality of the prompt and the users ability to recognize when a response should be verified elsewhere. OpenAI is aiming to make it even more appealing to turn to ChatPGT first for search by trying to get people to use a browser with ChatGPT built in. Smart speakers and YouTube The impact of ChatGPT has reverberated beyond search engines. Voice assistants, such as Alexa speakers and Google Home, continue to report high ownership, but that number is down slightly. One 2025 summary of voice-search statistics estimates that about 34% of people ages 12 and up own a smart speaker, down from 35% in 2023. This is not a dramatic decline, but the lack of growth may indicate a shift of more complex queries to ChatGPT or similar tools. When people want a detailed explanation, a step-by-step plan or help drafting something, a voice assistant that answers in a short sentence suddenly feels limited. By contrast, YouTube remains a giant. As of 2024, it had approximately 2.74 billion users, with that number increasing steadily since 2010. Among U.S. teens, about 90% say they use YouTube, making it the most widely used platform in that age group. But what kind of videos people are looking for is changing. People now tend to start with ChatGPT and then move to YouTube if they need the additional information a how-to video conveys. For many everyday tasks, such as explain my health benefits or help me write a complaint email, people ask ChatGPT for a summary, script or checklist. They head to YouTube only if they need to seea physical process. You can see a similar pattern in more specialized spaces. Software engineers, for instance, have long relied on sites such as Stack Overflow for tips and pieces of software code. But question volume there began dropping sharply after ChatGPTs release, and one analysis suggests overall traffic fell by about 50% between 2022 and 2024. When a chatbot can generate a code snippet and an explanation on demand, fewer people bother typing a question into a public forum. So where does that leave us? Three years in, ChatGPT hasnt replaced the rest of the tech stack; its reordered it. The default search has shifted. Search engines are still for deep dives and complex comparisons. YouTube is still for seeing real people do real things. Smart speakers are still for hands-free convenience. But when people need to figure something out, many now start with a chat conversation, not a search box. Thats the real ChatGPT effect: It didnt just add another app to our phonesit quietly changed how we look things up in the first place. Deborah Lee is a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Thanksgiving is behind us, which means the holiday shopping season has officially begun. And that means that both companies and third-party retailers will spend every day between now and Christmas morning trying to get you to spend your consumer dollars with them. As in years past, one of the most sought-after gifts will be the smartphone. According to an analysis last month by global marketing research firm NielsenIQ, 37% of shoppers buying tech this season have smartphones on their list. And when it comes to smartphone brands, Apple tops tech buyer preferences, with 54% of those surveyed looking to buy an iPhone. But as anyone who knows Apple well knows, the company rarely offers sales on its iconic smartphoneeven during the holidays. Yet that doesnt mean iPhone deals cant be had this festive season. You just need to know where to look. Here are three shopping hacks you can use to find the best deals on iPhones this holiday season. Use price tracking websites to keep tabs on iPhone sales Theres no shortage of places to buy an iPhone. Besides purchasing one directly from Apple, you can pick one up at nearly anywhere where electronics are sold, including Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, carrier stores like AT&T and Verizon, eBay, and more. Yet manually checking to see if any of these third-party resellers offer iPhone deals during the holidays (which they often do) can be time-consuming. But thats where price tracking websites come in. They let you quickly check whether an iPhone is on sale and often provide the direct link to buy it before the sale price disappears. There are numerous price tracking websites and apps you can use to find the best sales on an iPhone. These include sites like CamelCamelCamel, which tracks the prices of products available on Amazon. Just type in the iPhone model you are looking for in CamelCamelCamels search bar, and youll see Amazons current price of the model, along with new and used prices from third-party resellers on the site. You can also add your desired iPhone to a price watch list, and CamelCamelCamel will notify you as soon as it detects a sale. There are also plenty of tech sites that offer dedicated price trackers for Apple products, including iPhones. Some of the better ones include AppleInsiders iPhone Price Guide and 9to5Toys’ Apple tracker. The advantage of checking these sites is that they tend to show iPhone deals from across the web, not just on Amazon. MacPrices.net also keeps a good running list of iPhone deals. Use Google Chromes Shopping Insights and price tracking Yes, its somewhat ironic that Apple’s competitor, Google, can help you find a good deal on the iPhone. But it can. Google’s Chrome browser offers a feature called Shopping Insights that lets you view the price of a product over time, track its price, and receive notifications when the price drops. The tool is great for those looking for a deal on an iPhone (or any other product) but don’t want to check dedicated price-tracking websites multiple times a day. Shopping Insights is built into Chrome on PC, Mac, Android, and iOS and is simple to use. Just go to a retailers website and look up the iPhone you want to buy. In Chromes URL bar, youll see a shopping bag icon. Tap it to get shipping insights for your desired iPhone, click Save and Track Price, then turn on price notifications to be alerted when the iPhone you want goes on sale. (Full details about how to use Chromes Shopping Insights and price tracking tools can be found here.) Use ChatGPT to find the best holiday deals on iPhone The holidays are a busy time, so maybe you dont want to spend your time browsing price tracking websites or clicking around in Chrome to find iPhone deals. In that case, this final shopping hack to help you find a deal on an iPhone is probably for you: Just ask ChatGPT. Given that you can use ChatGPT to find deals on flights, it should be no surprise that you can also use OpenAIs chatbot to assist you in finding the best holiday shopping deals for an iPhone. I asked ChatGPT where I could buy an iPhone 16 with at least 256 GB of storage for the best deal right now, and the chatbot instantly returned a list of results showing a range of prices for the model, both new and used, along with direct links to where I could buy them. It was by far the easiest and fastest way to find iPhone deals out of all the methods above.
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E-Commerce
Theres an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that peoples perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess thats why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a different culture knows, peoples perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvards Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be. So if the Inuit snow myth highlights an important concept, many would argue that theres no real harm in repeating it, in much the same way we continue to tell the apocryphal story of George Washington cutting down his fathers cherry tree. Yet truth matters. Once we start degrading it, we lose our ability to understand what is often a messy and nuanced world. What do you call a square? What makes the Inuit snow myth compelling is that it so viscerally illustrates how language can reveal deeper truths. For example, in German the word for square is Platz and in neighboring Poland, it is Plac, a word that is pronounced very similarly. In Russian, the word is Ploshchad, so again, you can see the family resemblance. In Ukraine, however, which is geographically and linguistically in the middle of all those countries, the word for square is completely different. It is Maidan and comes from Turkish, which gives you hints about Ukraines history with the Crimean Khanate, its historical ties to Byzantium, and lots of other interesting things. Slavic languages are filled with these fascinating historical remnants. The word slav comes from the same root as word (slov). So Slavs considered themselves people of the word. The word for German in slavic languages is Niemiec, which roughly translates to doesnt speak, and shows how the Slavs considered the Germanic tribes Barbarians. Languages, of course, continue to evolve. Since the early 1990s, the Independence Square in the center of Kyiv, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, has been the place where people go to protest, especially during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. So today, when Ukrainians say that its time to go to the Maidan, they mean its time to revolt. The Inuit snow myth alerts us to the possibility of examining languages in this way and many would argue that we shouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. Still, once we abandon truth, we start down a troubled path. The myths of Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox PARC We tell stories because specific narratives can often point to more general principles. For example, when pundits want to show the dangers of complacent corporate giants getting caught sleeping, they often point to Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox. Yet, much like the Inuit snow myth, these stories arent really true. Lets look at each one in turn. Blockbuster is supposedly a cautionary tale because it ignored Netflix until it was too late. Yet as Gina Keating, who covered the story for years at Reuters, explains in her book Netflixed, the video giant moved relatively quickly and came up with a successful strategy. The real problem was that those changes tanked the stock price and the strategy was reversed when CEO John Antioco left after a compensation dispute with investor Carl Icahn. In a similar vein, were often told that, after inventing digital photography, Kodak ignored the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, its EasyShare line of cameras were top sellers. It also made big investments in quality printing for digital photos. The problem was that it made most of its money on developing film, a business that completely disappeared. Another popular fable is that Xerox failed to commercialize the technology developed at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), when in fact the laser printer developed there saved the company. What also conveniently gets left out is that Steve Jobs was able to get access to the companys technology to build the Macintosh because Xerox had invested in Apple and then profited handsomely from that investment. I recently got the chance to discuss each of these with Paul Nunes, who for years headed up thought leadership at Accenture, on Aidan McCullins Innovation Show and what we noticed was that, in each case, the pundit version would lead you exactly the wrong way. Blockbusters problem wasnt that they ignored external threats, but failed to account for internal resistance. Digital photography would never have replaced Kodaks film developing business and Xerox PARC is actually a success story that other firms would do well to emulate. Feynmans Law History is full of brave souls who defied the status quo. In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered handwashing in hospitals, only to be rebuked by the medical establishment. In the early 20th century, William Coley pioneered cancer immunotherapy, only to be ignored. Barry Marshall was pilloried for his work that showed peptic ulcers were caused not by stress, but by the bacterium H. pylori. Yet being contrarian doesnt make you right. During Soviet times, Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscientific agricultural theories led to crop failures and contributed to famines that killed millions. More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s vaccine skepticism has coincided with a resurgence of measles. So how do we engage in healthy skepticism of the zeitgeist without descending into quackery? The physicist Richard Feynman, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, offers helpful guidance. He said that science begins with a guess. Thats not only allowable, but necessary. To discover something new, you need to let your mind roam free. Impossible, even ridiculous ideas, are how we break new ground. Yet the second step is crucial: you have to test your ideas. Or, as Feynman put it, If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesnt make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesnt matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. Thats all there is to it. The Narrative Fallacy The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains arent aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, reached similar conclusions. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, such as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive, and fast. The second is rational, deliberative, and slow. Our bodies evolved to make decisions quickly in life-or-death situations. Our rational minds came much later and dont automatically engage. It takes conscious effort to activate the second system. The problem is that when something feels right, humans have a tendency to build stories around them. False fables like those about Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox, purport to teach us important lessons, but the truth is that they rob us of the opportunity to unlock deeper insights. Thats why Ive learned to be suspicious of good stories, especially those that I want to be true because they just feel right. We need to constantly interrogate our feelings, especially in areas for which we do not have specific training or relevant expertise. We need to understand what exactly our emotions are alerting us to, and that requires us to engage our rational mind. Thats why, sometimes, you need to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Category:
E-Commerce