NYT on Amazon: “Most shoppers on Amazon don’t fixate on the flaws. Amazon has trained people to believe that they can rely on it to find what they need fast, usually. Buying is a breeze, usually, and Prime members and people who have Amazon credit cards have incentives to shop only there. If you have a problem, it’s easy to get help — not always but often. Amazon’s prices aren’t always the lowest, but sometimes they are, and many people don’t bother to look elsewhere…Amazon is proof yet again that the best product doesn’t necessarily win. We gravitate to products and services like Amazon, Netflix and Zoom that win our trust and make using them so easy that it feels like magic.”
PorchLight Books: “In The Power of Nothing to Lose, award-winning economist William Silber explores the phenomenon in politics, war, and business, where situations with a big upside and limited downside trigger gambling behavior like with a Hail Mary. Silber describes in colorful detail how the American Revolution turned on such a gamble. The famous scene of Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas night to attack the enemy may not look like a Hail Mary, but it was. Washington said days before his risky decision, “If this fails I think the game will be pretty well up.” Rosa Parks remained seated in the white section of an Alabama bus, defying local segregation laws, an act that sparked the modern civil rights movement in America. It was a life-threatening decision for her, but she said, “I was not frightened. I just made up my mind that as long as we accepted that kind of treatment it would continue, so I had nothing to lose.””
WSJ: “Research shows that we are overconfident in our beliefs but underconfident about being heard. So we compensate by being loud.”
