Au Contraire: Stories of Counterintuitive Thinking

Think Different - Not everything we believe is true is true, not everything we believe is false is false. We must be prepared to challenge our beliefs and the stories below help us do this.

1. Peter Nonacs, a professor at UCLA, encourages his students to cheat. , “You are UCLA students. The brightest of the bright. Let’s see what you can accomplish when you have no restrictions, and the only thing that matters is getting the best answer possible.”
   
   
2. 4 minutes of exercise a day is enough to receive significant health benefits. 
3. The best work can sometimes be done in the shortest amount of time. More time doesn't mean better outcome, allocating more time can sometimes lead to worse outcomes because of Parkinson's Law.
   
   
4. Peter principle states your boss is probably in a role above their ability "managers rise to the level of their incompetence".
   
   
5. Size of Greenland and Africa on a map vs reality.
   
   
   
   
6. Supply and Demand Markets. You’re supposed to sell your shares when everyone is enthusiastic about them, and buy shares when everyone is skeptical about them if you want to make a profit.
   
   
7. Benford's Law - In sets of numbers, the number 1 should show up far more than the number 9. This has been used to detect fraud in elections, accounting, government reporting and evidence based on Benford's law has been admitted in criminal cases in the USA.
   
   
   
8. By refusing the pay ransoms and negotiating with terrorists, you may lose in the short term but win in the long term as the business becomes unprofitable thus the incentive to kidnap is also gone. Israel and USA have strong policies of non-negotiation while Europe doesn't. An investigation by The New York Times found that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008. These payments were made almost exclusively by European governments
   
   
9. More competition is better in a growing industry as it helps gets the word out and makes the pie bigger. This is also true of spending on administration by not for profits. See Dan Pallotta's TED Talk.
   
   

10. During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage! The RAF was initially confused.

    Wald had data only on the planes that returned to Britain so the bullet holes that Wald saw were all in places where a plane could be hit and still survive. The planes that were shot down were probably hit in different places than those that returned so Wald recommended adding armor to the places where the surviving planes were lucky enough not to have been hit. (reddit)

11. Pretty much all the cognitive biases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias 
    
    
12. The currently unsolved Two Envelopes Problem. https://www.facebook.com/notes/brenton-johnson/two-envelopes-problem/10152801954934583/
    
    
13. Cobra Effect - In Hanoi, Vietnam, under French colonial rule. The colonial regime created a bounty program that paid a reward for each rat killed. To obtain the bounty, people would provide the severed rat tail. Colonial officials, however, began noticing rats in Hanoi with no tails.
    
    The Vietnamese rat catchers would capture rats, lop off their tails, and then release them back into the sewers so that they could procreate and produce more rats, thereby increasing the rat catchers' revenue.
    
    
14. The more safe you make something, the more careless people become with it (needs a reference)
    
    
15. Sometimes having fewer options is better than having more options. ( See more on game theory - https://williamspaniel.com/2014/05/25/game-theory-is-really-counterintuitive/)
    
    
16. More roads generally leads to more congestion. More cars on a freeway leads to slower throughput.