Notes on Rory Sutherland at Zeitgeist
My notes on a fabulous talk from Rory Sutherland (Vice-Charirman, Ogilvy Group UK) on the spectacularly irrational and relativist nature of our perceptions of everything from pain, temperature, volume, and price.
- Humans actually don’t like efficiency.
- We instinctivly trust people and organizations who have resources to spare.
- The engineer mindset despises ambiguity and compromise, and is therefore drawn to absolutist views of anything from economics, to politics, to religion.
- In a restaurant, the value created by cooking a meal and the value created by sweeping the floor are inseparable. To make value judgements that separate the two activities is fundamentally wrong.
- Price is insanely subjective.
- Nearly all of our perceptions are entirely relativistic - temperature, heat, pain, pleasure, volume, pitch - all relative. Absolute measures, there are virtually none.
- It’s the same if you’re an economist, it’s not the same if you’re a human being.
- Video conferences are mistakenly framed as the poor man’s business trip instead of the rich man’s phone call.
- The inability to make a comparison to infinity is disasterous.
- Context and timing determines value.
- Duration is spectacularly unimportant to the human memory.