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It is a common assumption that winning is a positive thing and most of the time that is true. However, are their situations when being the winner is actually a net negative experience? According to Nobel Prize winning Behavioral Economist Richard Thaler, this happens more often than you think.
In a recent Planet Money episode, host Greg Rosalsky, explores Thaler’s concept of “The Winner’s Curse.” This idea arose from Thaler’s pushback against traditional economics.
In column after column, Thaler shined a spotlight on anomalies that didn’t fit with the tidy, mathematical portrayal of humans in popular economic models (“Anomalies” was actually the title of the column.)
One anomaly Thaler highlighted was what he called “The Winner’s Curse.” The winner’s curse refers to the winners of auctions. That includes the classic auction with auctioneers speaking really fast, selling antiques or paintings or whatever. But it also applies to markets where people competitively bid against each other to buy something, which includes things like bidding wars over buying a house, companies competing to acquire other companies, and sports teams fighting to sign star rookies in a draft.
Richard Thaler
What Thaler challenged was the idea that winning is everything. In his view, sometimes it was better not to win because the economic benefit of the item in question is outweighed by the cost of acquiring it in the auction.
In the standard economic way of seeing auctions, the winner is someone who values it the most after a careful cost-benefit analysis of what they’re bidding on, using the best available information. Presumably, the winner is, well, the winner. But what if the winner is, more often than not, actually the loser? What if winners, systematically, are the ones who pay too much for what they’re buying?
In one of his columns, Thaler suggested exactly that. That, actually, in competitive auctions, the winner is often the one who makes a mistake and overpays. That is, the winner is someone who — perhaps irrationally — buys something for more than it’s worth. Hence the curse.
The Winner’s Curse is not limited to auctions. Think about the number of times you have rushed to buy the last item on sale and later discovered it wasn’t worth the money. Or consider the game show contest who wins a prize yet is now required to pay high taxes afterwards in order to claim it. We see it in professional sports teams who trade away too many players and draft picks in order to claim on supposed superstar who then flops.
So how does one avoid The Winner’s Curse? Thaler has a simple answer.
Thaler told us: “The way you have to think about bidding in an auction is: if I win the auction, will I be happy?”
Have you ever misplaced an important document and felt less smart because of it?
Whether it is a computer file or a piece of paper, items that we have to invest time searching for limit our ability to make effective use of that information. Contrast this to files that are readily available at our fingertips or through an easy computer search. That information can be retrieved at a moment’s notice and is therefore much more useful. This distinction forms the basis of a new approach to understanding how we process information, known as boundary intelligence.
Rao proposes a new definition of intelligence in the age of AI: intelligence is defined by what information can be accessed under constraints of cost, availability, and time.
The reality is that storage is now cheap. Computation is even cheaper. What’s expensive is short-term memory access – the ability to keep the relevant details “in mind” for a given problem.
You might think that the amazing computational power of AI would render this a meaningless problem. However, Tiago believes even the fastest computers run into trouble with deciding what information is important to keep close at hand.
Thus, a computer’s “intelligence” is now constrained not by the power of its processor, but by its ability to keep the right fragments of the past (and the imagined future) close enough to inform the present. In other words, the bottleneck of a system’s intelligence is how cheaply it can remember.
If you look at how modern computers perform, you can see this principle at work. A CPU can perform billions of operations per second, but is often stuck waiting for the right information to arrive from memory. Storage is cheap and computing is abundant, but what remains tremendously expensive is getting the right data to the right place at the right time.
It’s not the price of knowing that limits intelligence now, but the price of remembering.
This brings Tiago to the definition of boundary intelligence.
Rao calls this “boundary intelligence” – the ability to make good decisions at the boundary about what information becomes “knowable” at any given time.
How does this end up working practice, whether it is a person or AI model? In the end, it often comes down to practicality.
They are not retrieving the ideal memory; they’re retrieving the affordable one. Intelligence in this view isn’t about optimizing across all known information, but optimizing for accessible information under constraints.
A deeper study of boundary intelligence leads Tiago to an interesting understanding. He believes intelligence is no longer about what one single person or computers knows or has in storage. Instead, it is about knowing where to get the information at in the right time, no matter if you are a person or an AI model.
This means that boundary intelligence is fundamentally social. It isn’t just about what to retrieve, but from where and from whom. You have to know who to trust, what information or resources they possess, on what terms you can acquire it, and what is expected of you in return.
Are you only surviving at your job or are you thriving at work?
Every year the folks at O.C. Tanner release their Global Culture Report. This is an insightful look across the world at how organizations of all types are holding up in terms of developing strong cultures. In last year’s report, one element that O.C. Tanner explored was whether employees are thriving at work or merely surviving. How do they define the difference between the two states? Below is an excerpt from the report’s introduction.
People who are merely surviving feel anxious, financially uncertain, doubtful of growth opportunities, and pessimistic about the future. Their struggles at work impact their ability to survive outside of work. As an employee in one focus group said, “Not surviving at work will affect everything to a point where it’s scary.”
Contrast that with people who are thriving. They feel their organization cares about their mental health, they work in a cooperative workplace, and they have opportunities for growth and mentorship along a clearly defined career advancement path. They have hope.
How does an organization move its employees from a survival situation to a thriving state? O.C. Tanner suggests using what it calls a Total Rewards strategy.
The modern workplace requires a Total Rewards strategy designed to help employees survive and thrive. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of offerings, organizations should prioritize meeting employees’ basic needs, and the goal of Total Rewards should be to demonstrate how the organization cares and wants everyone to thrive at work.
Categorically speaking, offerings like competitive compensation and health benefits are considered basic, help provide financial stability, and meet survival needs. Offerings such as career development and skill building move beyond the required to provide long-term growth and satisfy other criteria to thrive. Interestingly, recognition is a practice that provides a bridge to help employees feel seen and valued at any stage of surviving or thriving. Keeping these distinctions top of mind helps Total Rewards leaders prioritize care at the core of their compensation and benefits mix.
It is very easy to see when our physical items are getting too messy. Whether it is paperwork piling up on a desk, or a storeroom full of overflowing boxes, this clutter we can see with our eyes. However, the most insidious form of mess is the type made up of bits and bytes. If we are not mindful, digital clutter can get out of control very fast.
Over at the Strange & Charmed website, Alexis, also known as @MissTrenchcoat, is very much aware of the negative impact of digital clutter. In her article called, 7 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life, Alexis starts out by addressing an important question: In an age when we have almost unlimited storage, is cleaning up our virtual mess even necessary?
You’re right, we do have nearly unlimited storage space for all our digital information, however, when was the last time you truly went back and reviewed older files? I know for me, I occasionally scroll through files looking for something I know I saved and because of all the other digital clutter, it’s hard for me to find that one single thing I’m looking for. Even when I use the search function in an app like my email to find something I know I saved, I find it hard to locate that specific email. I’ve frequently lost digital files on my devices, and so, perhaps we give that seemingly unlimited storage capacity and search functionality too much credit.
Alexis then brings her reader’s attention to easy areas to declutter, such as our subscriptions.
I know you’ll find emails from subscription lists you no longer enjoy. So, to cut down on future email clutter, let’s just take a minute, before deleting those old emails, to locate and use the unsubscribe function to prevent future email clutter.
She moves on to electronic data we don’t normally consider being cluttered, such as apps.
As I am completely integrated into the Apple ecosystem, whenever I get a new device, like a new iPhone for instance, it automatically downloads all the apps from every other device I own. Ugh! This is such a pain because I use certain apps on my iPad and not on my iPhone, and I end up with pages of apps I need to organize or remove. Let’s save ourselves the hassle and just purge all the old apps we no longer use. So check your phone, tablet and even your computer for old apps or software you can remove to save space and processing power for other things.
When I say libraries, what is the first thing to come to mind?
It was probably books.
The purpose of libraries for thousands of years was to collect and preserve the written word. Of course, having books alone is not enough without people who know how to read them. That is why libraries have always strived to expand literacy. This is especially true today, even in the digital age.
Without public libraries, it is much harder to solve the problem of illiteracy. At a time when only 31% of U.S. fourth graders are reading proficiently, a continuing downward trend from previous years, it is especially worrying that public libraries — critical to helping children and their families begin the important process of reading and writing fluently to gain on-grade skills — are under attack.
Rainwater stresses how libraries play a bigger role in our communities beyond just acquiring books.
Libraries are more than just passive repositories of books; they are indispensable neighborhood resources. Libraries are learning hubs at the very heart of community literacy, anchor spaces providing essential support to our youngest readers and their families, teachers, and other literacy providers, helping to build out a strong “literacy ecosystem” across communities.
From his leadership position at one of the largest library organizations in North America, Rainwater understands the challenges and knows how libraries are making a difference in their communities.
I am the president and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council (ULC), an organization dedicated to strengthening and advancing the essential role of public libraries as dynamic, accessible places for opportunity, learning and innovation. I’m proud to say that, despite the challenging environment we are in, our member libraries are still stepping up to meet the needs of our developing readers and their families in numerous ways that are aligned to all that we know about how young brains learn to read.
Since it exploded onto the scene in 2022, ChatGPT and its AI cousins have created a sensation. Aspects of knowledge work that were always assumed to be the province of humans can now be done in mere moments with the proper prompt. This has led many prognosticators to assume that AI will take over all white-collar work. After three years of these AI tools, what is the actual truth?
A recent post from Daniel Pfeiffer on the website Choice360 sheds light on what people are actually doing with ChatGPT. In a review of a study of 1 million conversations, Pfeiffer discovered that the assumed absorption of knowledge work by AI tools is not what it seems. For starters, more people are using ChatGPT outside of work than at the office.
One of the key takeaways from this report is that, though work-related usages of ChatGPT continue to grow, they are wildly outpaced by nonwork-related usages, which have grown from 53 to 73 percent of all ChatGPT messages. This finding raises two important questions: Given its ostensible economic promises, why isn’t work-related usage growing faster, and why is nonwork usage growing so much?
Pfeiffer speculates that the clean AI interface has become preferable for regular searching than the messier Google page. The results are also easier for the average person to interpret, saving them time previously used to click through to other websites.
Another assumption is that most people are using ChatGPT to write the original copy of documents. However, actual use appears to be different.
Given the prized role of writing in educational environments, many academics might assume that when people use ChatGPT “for writing,” they’re using it specifically to generate new text from scratch—hence, the return of blue books. What this report finds, however, is that about two-thirds of all writing tasks have ChatGPT modify existing text, e.g., editing it for errors, adjusting the tone, or offering critiques, rather than generating new text.
On closer inspection, Pfeifer wonders if this finding holds for all types of users.
As we await more data, I think it behooves us to keep in mind that “writing” encompasses a range of activities. While we might imagine that students are asking ChatGPT to “write a seven-page essay on the Civil War,” for instance, they might well be using it to “make this email sound more professional.”
Image generated with WordPress AI
A third issue considered in the study is the economic impact of generative AI on workers. The media discussion often assumes that AI will take away jobs, especially lower-level knowledge work. Again, that may not be the case yet.
To get a more granular picture, researchers ran all the work-related messages through a different taxonomy based on common work activities, e.g., communicating with supervisors, scheduling events, and training others. They found that 57.9 percent of work-related messages fell into two broad categories “1) obtaining, documenting, and interpreting information; and 2) making decisions, giving advice, solving problems, and thinking creatively”. In other words, people are using ChatGPT less as a replacement worker and more as an advisor and research assistant.
Reflecting on this finding, Pfieffer comes to this conclusion.
“ChatGPT likely improves worker output by providing decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where productivity is increasing in the quality of decision-making.”
Finally, Pfieffer speculates on the impact of hallucinations. As librarians have long complained, it is easy for people to believe what AI says rather than confirm that it is true. The study does not measure the effect of wrong information on people’s productivity and decisions.
Do you have more to do than you have time to do it in?
It is a common problem for knowledge workers to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible tasks and projects on the table. The challenge is determining which one of the many items are priorities, which would be nice to do, and which are really not worth the time. Is there a way to make this assessment?
A few years ago, Priscilla Claman tackled this problem in the Harvard Business Review with an article called Stop Doing Low-Value Work. She believes part of the problem is that knowledge workers tend to inherit tasks from other workers, especially when those people leave the organization.
Although the jobs went away, much of the work didn’t. Teachers ended up with more children in a classroom; customer service representatives ended up with more phone calls; and managers ended up with more people to manage as teams were consolidated. No matter the job, everyone ended up with a lot more work.
Image generated with WordPress AI Image Generator
Therefore, how can a knowledge worker identify and eliminate low-value work? One way is through automation. This is especially true with the new AI tools, although the article was written before the Chat GPT revolution.
Whether you are talking about scheduling, acknowledging, or making standard arrangements, there are probably existing applications that you could use. Just figure out what you want to do and find someone to help you do it.
She also suggests simply asking around to see if there are tasks that are now unnecessary. Then with that permission drop the items from your list.
Another approach is to ask your clients if you can not do something, just the way retail store clerks now ask people if they really want their receipts. The idea is simply to stop doing something that isn’t important, but to check first so that it doesn’t get you into trouble.
For example, being tricked into a purchase you didn’t need, or falling for an online scam. It seems like we are exposed to more and more cons every day. Therefore, how can we better defend ourselves from in person and online tricksters?
What’s fascinating about examples like these is that while they’re perpetrated by other people or entities, the real work of persuasion largely takes place in our heads, according to UK-based presenter and broadcaster Alexis Conran. “Magic and sales and scams and political beliefs all happen in the mind of the spectator,” Conran points out in a TEDxBerlin talk.
Chen proceeds to discuss the first way that we are often fooled. It is through the simple use of misdirection.
Misdirection is an age-old tactic used by thieves of all kinds. It’s why pickpockets snatch wallets when they know we’re occupied by an outdoors concert or fireworks display or by reading our phones or books while we commute.
Misdirection can occur on a more subtle level, too. It’s why companies and governments often release bad news on Fridays or before major holidays — they’re obliged to announce a weak earnings report or the so-so unemployment rate but they’re hoping that the weekend or holiday distracts us from fixating on it.
Efficient Librarian 