Failure may be an option but quitting is not.
Cuando a la gente no se la obliga a pagar todos los costes de sus acciones, tiene pocos incentivos para cambiar de conducta.
Consider the kind of questions that kids ask. Sure, they may be silly or simplistic or out of bounds. But kids are also relentlessly curious and relatively unbiased. Because they know so little, they...
Consider the Iraq War. It was executed primarily on U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al Qaeda. To be sure, there was more to it than that—politics...
Come up with a terrible idea? No problem—just don’t act on it.
But if you are hell-bent on persuading someone, or if your back is truly against the wall, you might as well give it your best shot.
But guns are not the whole story. In Switzerland, every adult male is issued an assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep the gun at home. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firea...
But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others’.
Borody claims to have used fecal transplants to effectively cure people who were suffering from ulcerative colitis—which, he says, was
Between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 worldwide shark attacks each year, with a high of 79 and a low of 46. There were on average 5.9 fatalities per year, with a high of 11 and a low of 3....
Because poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
As the Inuits say, Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.
Ante cualquier incentivo, cualquier situación, la gente deshonesta tratará de obtener un beneficio sin importar los medios a emplear.
And what about the other half of the election truism—that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge? In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the presidency, the...
An opponent who feels his argument is ignored isn’t likely to engage with you at all.
A story, meanwhile, fills out the picture. It uses data, statistical or otherwise, to portray a sense of magnitude; without data, we have no idea how a story fits into the larger scheme of things. A g...
A pair of researchers named Kristen Schilt and Matthew Wiswall wanted to systematically examine what happens to the salaries of people who switched gender as adults. It is not quite the experiment we...
A little girl named Mary goes to the beach with her mother and brother. They drive there in a red car. At the beach they swim, eat some ice cream, play in the sand, and have sandwiches for lunch. Now...
A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it. Our job in this book is to come up with such questions.
1. What Does It Mean to Think Like a Freak?