Simplifying Complexity In conversation with Rory Sutherland - Part 1
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Feb 5, 2024 
In this episode, Rory Sutherland, UK Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, discusses how bees build resilience, the dangers of short-term rationality, and why efficiency doesn't always lead to effectiveness. They explore decision-making in engineering, customer diversity in markets, and the importance of balancing exploration and exploitation in complex systems.
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Oversimplification in Decision-Making
- People make decisions in business and government under the pretense of non-complexity, oversimplifying messy problems.
- They solve for the simplified puzzle and re-impose the solution onto the original mess, ignoring complex factors.
Transport for Humans
- Rory Sutherland co-authored "Transport for Humans," arguing against modeling transport without psychology.
- He emphasizes that human behavior, non-linearity, and feedback loops are crucial in transport models.
Optimization Mistakes
- Optimizing for the average and assuming linear relationships are common mistakes in economics.
- The single representative agent model and optimizing for the short-term as a proxy for the long-term are flawed.