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This is a childrearing technique, too: say “please do X”, where X precludes Y, rather than saying “please don’t do Y!”, which just increases the salience, and therefore likelihood, of Y.



Don't put marbles in your nose

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpz67hBIJwg


Don’t put marbles in your nose

Put them in there

Do not put them in there



I remember seeing a father loudly and strongly tell his daughter "DO NOT EAT THIS!" when holding one of those desiccant packets that come in some snacks. He turned around and she started to eat it.


Quick, don't think about cats!


Attributed to economist Gordon Tullock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Tullock#Tullock's_spike


I'm pretty sure I heard it first from a libertarian leaning experimental economist colleague. So checks out.


> Circa 2005, I heard a podcast with 90-something Ronald Coase. He has pissed. Everyone had been teaching his theorem backwards for decades, backed with the "chalkboard economics" he despised

Similar themes came up in Ronald Coase's appearance (at a stunningly-lucid 101 years old) on this 2012 episode of EconTalk: https://www.econtalk.org/coase-on-externalities-the-firm-and...

Plugging this as it's one of my favorite episodes of one of my favorite podcasts.


Erm... correction then. This is the episode I was referencing.

100-something Ronald Coase


> I don't know how bats works with the @test annotation? That doesn't look like valid shell syntax.

Bats runs the test files through a preprocessor[1] that, among other things, converts each `@test` case into a shell function. E.g. `@test "the doohickey should frob" { ... }` becomes `test_the_doohickey_should_frob() { ... }`.

[1] https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core/blob/master/libexec/b...


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