“We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?”

Most of that information is irrelevant. If only we could sort what matters from what doesn’t. The good news is that you can train your brain to evaluate the quality of information.Not only can you quickly determine if someone knows what they are talking about but you can sort the important information from the irrelevant information and focus your time on what matters.How? It turns out that Nobel Laurette Richard Feynman thought about this problem and created a series of “tricks” that he used repeatedly

We Are Drowning In Information

<ul><li>Decide whether someone else truly knows their stuff or is mimicking others.</li><li>What you want is to get as close to the truth as you can with the information available.</li><li>Knowledge is not static, and we need to be open to continually evaluating what we think we know.</li><li>Ask the right question, which is not “Could this be the case?” but “Is this actually the case?”</li><li>Not using the same data that gave you the clue to make the conclusion.</li><li>The plural of anecdote is not data. We must use proper statistical sampling.</li><li>Realize that we are missing information that we don’t know we’re missing.</li></ul>

Feynman's 7 “Tricks” for Evaluating Information

Richard Feynman offers a list of seven tricks that you can use to quickly sort important from irrelevant information and focus on what matters.

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Evaluating Information: Find the Signal in the Noise

The fear of choosing the wrong thing or having regrets about not going down a certain path is real. This decidophobia kicks in for the smallest of choices in our lives, due to the following reasons:<ul><li>Lack of clarity.</li><li>Fearing the wrong consequences.</li><li>Assuming others have a better perspective.</li><li>Comparing ourselves to others.</li><li>Too many decisions.</li></ul>

The Reason People Cannot Make Decisions

There are frankly very few things that are truly in our control. And often, the ‘what ifs’ in our minds are questions that we actually cannot have answers to because the answers depend on things that we cannot change. Asking ourselves whether this is something in our control or something we can change has actually been immensely helpful in making decisions that aren’t led by the fear of the unknown.

Determine What Is in Your Control vs. Not

Actually, take a vacation whenever :) But seriously — sometimes, it’s super refreshing to not think about something for a few days and come back to it with a new perspective.

When in Doubt, Take a Vacation

There are always going to be bigger decisions that we just do not have enough information about to have a clear answer on day 1 though. These are often the scariest because you think you aren’t getting anywhere in making the decision and are stuck in a loop of ‘no clue’. But embracing and believing in the process really does wonders. Every small step like making a pros and cons list, reaching out to people to gather more information, reading up, eliminating, etc. can make these bigger decisions much less scary.

Embrace the Process and Don’t Judge Your Success until You’re Through with The Proces

Nobody truly understands all the factors that underlie the decision. It’s important to talk to people to help shape your perspective — but ultimately, it’s your decision. And it’s essential to lead it with trust and confidence in yourself.

Trust and Confidence

Take a super tough decision. One that you have wanted to take for a while, have had an answer for a while, but you just haven’t been able to bring yourself to take it. The liberation and sense of closure that you get from taking that decision is unmatched. Suddenly, the rest of the decision making will feel unclogged and the flow of making decisions will be much smoother and uninterrupted.

Take A Decision To Eliminate Fear Of Taking Decisions

I have always been extremely indecisive. I’ve spent countless hours stressing, debating, going back and forth on decisions that in hindsight, certainly didn’t need to occupy that much of my…

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Decidophobia —  fear of taking wrong decisions

<ul><li>Jeffrey Bezos is the founder and former CEO of Amazon.</li><li>With a net worth of US$182b, he's the world's second wealthiest person.</li></ul>The Jeff Bezos Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions Framework is a powerful mental model for unlocking growth in your career, business, relationships, or life.

How The World's Second Richest Man Makes Decisions

There are some subtle traps that even high-performing large organizations can fall into as a matter of course, and we’ll have to learn as an institution how to guard against them. One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making.

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before.Most decisions are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal but reversible decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.

Irreversible And Reversible Decisions

Irreversible and reversible decisions exist on a continuum—they're not binary.You need to plot your decision against each spectrum to determine the importance of the decision.

Going In A Flow

Decisions can be broken down in three dimensions:1 Resource investment from a decision2 The overall impact of a positive outcome3 The impacts of a negative outcomeThe process involves plotting a point along each spectrum to determine overall importance.

The Three Dimensions

Step 1: Determine whether the decision is reversibleStep 2: If it's reversible, have confidence in making the decision quicklyStep 3: For irreversible decisions, slow down and gather more information before decidingReversible decisions aren't an excuse to act recklessly.They're a recognition that the ability to make decisions quickly is a competitive and life advantage.

Applying The Decision Framework In Our Lives

<ul><li>Once you start using this framework, you'll quickly learn that the vast majority of decisions are reversible.</li><li>This will unlock considerable progress for yourself, your career, or your business.</li><li>We should always aspire to speed, because time is the one resource we lack most.</li><li>Fear of failure and perfectionism is one of the greatest barriers to individual and collective human progress.</li><li>Much of overcoming these is learning when to go fast and when to go slow.</li><li>The irreversible vs. reversible decisions framework allows you to do that.</li></ul>

The Bottom Line

The Jeff Bezos Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions Framework

Reversible Vs Irreversible Decisions - The Jeff Bezos Model

We naturally prefer one of two basic approaches to motivatation: <ul><li>A promotion-focused style - thinking about positive outcomes.</li><li>A prevention-focused style - focusesing on maintaining safety.</li></ul> We experience a psychological phenomenon called "regulatory fit" when the way we approach a goal matches our preferred style. Things just feel more natural. "Regulatory fit" also affects our moral decision-making.

Psychological phenomenon named “regulatory fit”

Degrees of moral engagement:<ul><li>Low disengagers view morality as binding and immorality as wrong.</li><li>High disengagers have a flexible moral compass. They dissociate transgressive behaviours with morality when it is convenient.</li></ul> Researchers found that morally flexible participants (high disengagers) are more likely to cheat on their partners. When they experience regulatory fit (it feels right), they are even more likely to cheat. Those with a strong moral compass (low disengagers) were less likely to cheat. They're even less likely to do wrong when they are under regulatory fit.

How regulatory fit influence moral decision-making

We all have a preferred motivation style. When that aligns with how we’re approaching a specific goal, it can impact how ethical we are in sticky situations.

The Psychological Factor That Helps Shape Our Moral Decision-Making

The dogma is this: If we are interested in maximising the welfare of our citizens, we have to maximise individual freedom.  The reason is that freedom is good, valuable, worthwhile, and essential to being human. The way to maximise freedom is to maximise choice: The more choice people have, the more freedom they have. The more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.

The official dogma of all Western Industrial Societies

We have an almost unlimited variety of choices, for example, hundreds of salad dressings, an unlimited variety of phones, choices in health care, prescription drugs and more. Even something like our identity can become a matter of choice. We get to invent and reinvent ourselves as often as we please.  This huge freedom of choice means we have to make a decision, again and again and again. Should I answer this call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?

Too many choices

Too much choice has two negative effects on people:<ol><li>Paradoxically, it produces paralysis rather than liberation. Too many options, and people find it very difficult to choose at all.</li><li>Even if we overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of our selection than if we had fewer options. It's easy to imagine that a different choice would've been better.</li></ol>

Not everything should be a matter of choice

Too many options lead us to expect perfection - you may never be pleasantly surprised by quality because your expectations have gone through the roof.  When you choose from thousands of options, you may always feel disappointed. You may think you're at fault because you could've chosen something better. As a result, you have higher expectations and do better in general, but you still feel worse.

Expecting perfection and feeling worse

The problem that lies in the modern, affluent, Western societies is that expensive, complicated choices don't help. They make us worse off. Therefore, income redistribution can make everyone better off, because of how excess choice plagues us. Too many choices don't give freedom. It paralysis us, and decrease satisfaction.

Less choice as a policy matter

Needing to feel motivated? Enjoy these inspirational Ted talks that will change your perspective and make your day better.

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

communication

Communication

7 Days of Inspiration 

http://www.ted.com Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.  TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

videos

Videos

http://www.ted.com Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You're welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com

The paradox of choice | Barry Schwartz

Irrational thoughts enter our brains and affect our actions more often than we’d like to admit. From the sugary donut you regretted before taking your first bite, to getting upset with others for making the same mistakes you do — irrationality comes in many forms and seems to carry plenty of drawbacks.Yet, researchers note that the behaviour also gives our overly-taxed brains a rest and can even spark new innovations.

Irrational Humans: Introduction

<ul><li>Human beings are not logical, we are storytellers most interested in emotional comfort and safety.</li><li>We can convince ourselves and justify anything.</li><li>This is partly because our brains haven’t had a significant upgrade for millions of years.</li><li>On top of that, the human brain takes up <a href="https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-much-energy-does-thinking-use/">20 percent or more </a>of our energy.</li><li>Shortcuts can lead to accepting probabilities as facts, succumbing to confirmation bias and convincing ourselves that we have the ability to truly multitask.</li></ul>

Primitive Minds

<ul><li>While irrationality can sometimes trip us up, it can also fuel creativity and innovation.</li><li>Our irrational behaviours are associated with our desire to do something different. It can be considered an integral part of our survival and progression.</li><li>We may believe we are the smartest species, but we may be slow, illogical and limited in many aspects.</li></ul>

Irrationality And Innovation

Stemming from our neanderthal roots, we make irrational decisions for survival and safety. 

mindfulness

Mindfulness

The Reasons Why We Do Irrational Things

The decisions that we make are rarely impartial. Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like. We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we like. The tendency to judge in favour of people and symbols we like is called the bias from liking or loving.We are more likely to ignore faults and comply with the wishes of our friends or lovers rather than random strangers. We favour people, products, and actions associated with our favourite celebrities. Sometimes we even distort facts to facilitate love.

The Bias Of Love

<ul><li>Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like.</li><li>We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we like.</li><li>The tendency to judge in favour of people and symbols we like is called the bias from liking or loving.</li><li>Besides the liking tendency, there are several other factors at play: commitment/consistency bias, a bias from stress, an influence from an authority, a reciprocation effect, and some direct incentives and disincentives.</li></ul>

All Are Decisions Are Biased In Some Way

The Halo Effect occurs when a specific, positive characteristic determines the way a person is viewed by others on other, unrelated traits.In the case of beauty, we automatically assign favourable yet unrelated traits such as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence, to those we find physically attractive. For the most part, this attribution happens unnoticed.

Appearance and the Halo Effect

<ul><li>We like people who resemble us.</li><li>Whether it's appearance, opinions, lifestyle or background, we tend to favour people who in some dimension are most similar to ourselves.</li><li>Similarity bias extends to even such ambiguous traits as interests and background.</li><li>Even if the similarities are superficial, we still may end up liking the other person more than we should.</li></ul>

Similarity

<ul><li>We love to be loved and, consequently, we love those that love us.</li><li>Joe Girard, the world's "greatest car salesman", prints "I like you" and his name on every holiday card he sends out.</li><li>Our reaction can be so automatic, that we develop liking even when the attempt to win our favour is an obvious one.</li></ul>

Praise and Compliments Affect Us

<ul><li>Repeated exposure can be a powerful tool in establishing liking.</li><li>Take a picture of yourself and create a mirror image in one of the editing tools. Choose which one you like better</li><li>Show the two pictures to a friend and ask her to choose the better one as well. Your friend will prefer the true print, whereas you will think you look better in the mirror image</li></ul>

Familiarity

<ul><li>Charisma or attraction are not prerequisites for liking - a mere association with someone you like or trust can be enough</li><li>The bias from an association shows itself in many other domains and is especially strong when we associate with the person we like the most - ourselves</li><li>For example, a sports fan and his local team can be highly personal even though the association is often based only on shared location</li><li>Even a trivial association with success may reap benefits and breed confidence</li></ul>

Loving by Association and Referral

<ul><li>Someone who is conditioned to like the right people and pick their idols carefully can greatly benefit from these biases.</li><li>The time to call out the defence is when we feel ourselves liking the practitioner more than we should under the circumstances under which we feel manipulated.</li><li>Focus on our feelings rather than the other person's actions.</li><li>Ask yourself how much of what you feel is due to liking versus the actual facts of the situation.</li></ul>

How To Curb The Liking

The tendency to judge in favor of people and symbols we like is called the bias from liking or loving and it affects how we make decisions. Let's explore...

Bias from Liking/Loving: Why We Comply With Those We Love - Farnam Street

The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.

Don’t switch fields, don’t look for a new job, don’t move on.There’s a decent chance your motivation for leaving is driven by two things: The grass-is-greener fallacy of wrongly assuming the alternative is better or denying the fact that great opportunities occasionally require annoyance and sacrifice.On the flip side, some careers and jobs are dreadful, and the economy only works when people are willing and able to find better opportunities. Stay put is good advice maybe a third of the time when you’re young and perhaps half the time when you’re older.

Stay On Your Course

<ul><li>Most people would never consider marrying a partner until they’ve dated for at least a year, maybe five, because it takes that long to grasp what a person is or isn’t capable of beyond their surface-level resume. </li><li>However, people expect their employers and coworkers to give them full respect, autonomy, and confidence from the start. It rarely happens. </li><li>Trust has to be earned, and it’s mostly earned through firsthand observation over time when people watch you under a variety of circumstances. Even when you have a track record at other companies, trust is doled out in small doses initially.</li></ul>

Trust Takes Time

The key is that you’ll probably do your best work when you've earned your colleagues’ trust, which is the hidden value of staying put. This is especially true if your job involves making good decisions vs. doing something physical with your body. Good decisions <a href="https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/lazy-work-good-work/">require lots of quiet time alone in your head, maybe sitting on the couch thinking or going for a walk</a>. It rarely looks like work, which means your coworkers have to trust you when you’re doing it.

Earning Trust Is The Hidden Benefit Of Staying Put

In investing, selling after a bad stretch feels like the right thing to do. You learned your lesson and seek greener pastures. But everything we know about investing shows it’s the wrong action: the big money comes from compounding uninterrupted over years and decades, when what you’ve done is not as important <a href="https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-freakishly-strong-base/">as how long you’ve been doing it for</a>.

Staying Put In Investing

A lot of good ideas are ignored because they’re only occasionally useful. No one wants to bring them up because there are so many counterexamples of times they were wrong. One I thought about recently after watching a few friends manage their careers is the value of staying put. Don’t switch fields, don’t look for a new job, don’t move on. There’s a decent chance your motivation for leaving is driven by two things: The grass-is-greener fallacy of wrongly assuming the alternative is better, or denying the fact that great opportunities occasionally require annoyance and sacrifice. Of course it’s not universal advice. Some careers and jobs are dreadful, and the economy only works when people are willing and able to find better opportunities. Stay put is good advice maybe a third of the time when you’re young and perhaps half the time when you’re older. But when it’s good advice, it can be staggeringly good advice. What’s easy to overlook is that networks and trust compound like any other asset, and every time you switch jobs or careers you reset the clock to some degree. Robert Weinberg – a cancer researcher who’s worked at MIT for more than half a century – said recently: People say to me sometimes, “How could you stay in one place for so long?” We all know the lives of academic gypsies who spend three years here, 14 years there, five years there. And each time, each place they settle down they make friends and colleagues, and after a period of time they and their families are uprooted and moved to some other place. There is never any constancy in their lives. Never any robust social network. Never any lifelong friends whom one can associate with. So I have no regret about being a stick in the mud, having never moved very far, and working now only a couple hundred yards from where I was an undergraduate. If I were still doing the same things that I had done as a student I would be a little regretful. But in fact this is a very dynamic place. Academia is different from other careers. But this nails a few points. One is how long it takes for social networks to compound. Most people would never consider marrying a partner until they’ve dated for at least a year, maybe five, because it takes that long to grasp what a person is or isn’t capable of beyond their surface-level resume. But those same people expect their employers and coworkers to give them full respect, autonomy, and confidence from the start. It rarely happens. Trust has to be earned, and it’s mostly earned through firsthand observation over time, when people watch you under a variety of circumstances. Even when you have a track record at other companies, trust is doled out in small doses when you’re a new face. The key is that you’ll probably do your best work when your’ve earned your colleagues’ trust, which is the hidden value of staying put. This is especially true if your job involves making good decisions vs. doing something physical with your body. Good decisions require lots of quiet time alone in your head, maybe sitting on the couch thinking or going for a walk. It rarely looks like work, which means your coworkers have to trust you when you’re doing it. Then there’s the skill side. Most of the time you see someone do something incredible, with what seems like little effort, and you ask “How did you do that?”, the honest answer is, “I’ve been doing this every day for 10+ years.” Noticing patterns and connecting the subtle dots is something that’s hard to teach in a classroom but becomes obvious when you’ve lived and breathed a field for decades. All of that breaks down when you move to a new field or a new company. The shiny allure of new overrides the quiet power of compounding in a way that’s easy to overlook. In investing, selling after a bad stretch feels like the right thing to do. You learned your lesson and seek greener pastures. But everything we know about investing shows it’s the wrong action: the big money comes from compounding uninterrupted over years and decades, when what you’ve done is not as important as how long you’ve been doing it for. Nassim Taleb says if you’re going to panic in investing, panic early. Same goes for your career – if you’re going to quit, quit early so whatever’s next has a shot at compounding.

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Staying Put

When it comes to accuracy in decision-making, there are two types of error: <ul><li>Bias, which is an average error</li><li>Noise is the variability of error.</li></ul> For example:In a noisy system, judges give vastly different sentences to defendants who committed the same crime. Some judges give a one-month sentence, others one year, others seven years, and others somewhere in between.In a biased system, judges might consistently give sentences too high for certain crimes. In many situations, noise is a more severe source of inaccuracy and error than bias.

Two types of error that influence decision-making

Bias in an average error. It is also a psychological mechanism that causes systematic errors in people's judgments. It explains why an individual will make one mistake over another. Noise is the phenomenon of individual differences. It's variability across individuals.

Bias vs noise

You can do a noise edit if you have several employees performing an interchangeable function, like different federal judges, doctors,  or different underwriters in an insurance company. In a noise audit, people are given a realistic problem that they could encounter on their job. Then look at the variability of judgments. If the judgements are variable, then errors are variable.

Organisations can address noise with a "noise audit"

If you realise that there's more variability than you expected, you have several possibilities:
<ul>
<li>If the judgement is relatively simple, consider if you actually need human judgment or if you can replace judgment with some rule or algorithm. For example, the Apgar score, how to decide whether infants are healthy, is a rule.</li>
<li>In more complex cases, try to discipline judgment with "decision hygiene". It is a disciplined process where people making judgments follow the same thought process and likely reach similar conclusions.</li>
</ul>

What to do after the noise audit

Decision hygiene is intended to reduce noise, but it is also applicable to single decisions where noise is invisible. When facing a decision with multiple options, treat options like job candidates. Break up the problem and evaluate various aspects of the option, just like you would break up various traits of candidates. Do that while keeping the specific judgements:<ul><li>fact-based as much as possible</li><li>as independent of each other as possible</li></ul>

Decisions hygiene is a disciplined process

Wherever there is judgment, there will be noise. When trying to reduce noise, you can expect some pushback as people perceive what is happening as limiting their options and as a bureaucratic infringement on their role. Employees who are affected by this have to see this as something that helps them do their job, rather than something that replaces them or constrains them too much.  The purpose is not to eliminate intuition, but to delay it - to engage in a disciplined thought process before they form an intuition or global judgment.

Noise can be reduced, not eliminated

Reducing noise is primarily for organizations that make judgments and decisions, and it wants to do that with one voice. Noise is unwanted variability. In many other situations, diversity is actually interesting and valuable, for example, film reviewers and creative processes. There are also situations where a team with diverse expertise make partial judgments that you don't want to be identical. You want them to reflect different characteristics of the problem.

Situations where noise reduction doesn't apply

Lessons in Decision-Making from Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman

books

Books

The Art of Decision-Making

Noise is unwanted variability in judgments. Noise covers another way we make systematic errors in decision-making.

Ten years on from "Thinking Fast and Slow", Kahneman is back with a new book, Noise, that will again have you questioning what you thought you knew about making decisions.

A Conversation with Daniel Kahneman About “Noise” - By Evan Nesterak - Behavioral Scientist

Expanding diversity in the workplace is often seen as a good way to inject fresh ideas into an otherwise stagnant environment, and incorporating new perspectives can help members tackle problems from a number of different angles. But few have looked into exactly why or how this is so.While homogenous groups feel more confident in their performance and group interactions, it is the diverse groups that are more successful in completing their tasks.

The Premise

New research finds that socially different group members do more than simply introduce new viewpoints or approaches. In the study, diverse groups outperformed more homogeneous groups, not because of an influx of new ideas, but because diversity triggered more careful information processing that is absent in homogeneous groups.The mere presence of diversity in a group creates awkwardness, and the need to diffuse this tension leads to better group problem-solving.

Diversity Improves Decisions

Though people often feel more comfortable with others like themselves, homogeneity can hamper the exchange of different ideas and stifle the intellectual workout that stems from disagreements. People would prefer to spend time with others who agree with them rather than disagree with them.In diverse settings, people tend to view conversations as a potential source of conflict that can breed negative emotions. This can blind people to diversity’s upsides: new ideas can emerge, individuals can learn from one another, and they may discover the solution to a problem in the process.

Diversity in the Workplace Can Produce New Ideas

When a newcomer comes in, it interrupts the group. It changes the flow of the process and makes people stop and pay attention to the person.Whether they stop and pay attention to the newcomer is up to the group. But if they do, the pain will probably be worth the gain.