This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making test...
This confirmation problem pervades our modern life, since most conflicts have at their root the following mental bias: when Arabs and Israelis watch news reports they see different stories in the same...
This anchoring to a number is the reason people do not react to their total accumulated wealth, but to differences of wealth from whatever number they are currently anchored to. This is the major conf...
They had all the means to develop a spinning machine, but nobody tried—another example of knowledge hampering optionality. They probably needed someone like Steve Jobs—blessed with an absence of colle...
They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the...
These were the days before I decided to climb up the mountain, speak slowly and in a priestly tone, and try shaming people rather than insulting them.
There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted facto...
There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know.
The scientific association with a big idea, the brand name, goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation—even Charles Darwin, who uncultured scientists claim inven...
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.
The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.
The notion of economies of scale—that companies save money when they become large, hence more efficient—is often, apparently behind company expansions and mergers. It is prevalent in the collective co...
The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.
The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults lik...
The fact that people in countries with cold weather tend to be harder working, richer, less relaxed, less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over) organized and more harried than those in hott...
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.
The bias lowers our perception of the risks we incurred in the past, particularly for those of us who were lucky to have survived them. Your
The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.
Sosiaalinen media on vakavasti epäsosiaalinen, terveysruoat ovat empiirisesti epäterveellisiä, tietotyöläiset ovat erittäin tietämättömiä ja sosiaalitieteet eivät ole millään tavalla tieteellisiä.
Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it.