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bucket of cash will not cure poverty and a planeload of food will not cure famine .
Don’t be seduced by complexity
Why are better-educated people more extremist?
people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.
When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
the “worried well” crowd out the truly sick, wait times increase for everyone, and a massive share of the costs go to the final months of elderly patients’ lives, often without much real advantage.
until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need
Smart people love to make smart-sounding predictions, no matter how wrong they may turn out to be.
Most people are terrible at the seemingly simple task of assessing their own talents.
“Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.”
just because you’re great at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything.
Making grandiose assumptions about your abilities and failing to acknowledge what you don’t know can lead, unsurprisingly, to disaster.
Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good.
The incentives to fake it are simply too strong.
Since almost no one has a strong incentive to keep track of everyone else’s bad predictions, it costs almost nothing to pretend you know what will happen in the future.
When bad predictions are unpunished, what incentive is there to stop making them?
A moral compass can convince you that all the answers are obvious (even when they’re not); that there is a bright line between right and wrong (when often there isn’t); and, worst, that you are certain you already know everything you need to know about a subject so you stop trying to learn more.
Consider a problem like suicide. It is so morally fraught that we rarely discuss it in public; it is as if we’ve thrown a black drape over the entire topic.
“no one left to blame”
suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life.
what he and other experts know about suicide is dwarfed by what is unknown.
The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.
Voting may be one of the sloppiest feedback loops around, but it is feedback nonetheless.
the company spent millions of dollars to entice people to go shopping at precisely the same time that millions of people were about to go shopping anyway.
the randomized control trial has been the gold standard of learning for hundreds of years—but
To this day, on every single Sunday in every single market, this company still buys newspaper advertising—even though the only real piece of feedback they ever got is that the ads don’t work.
The miracle of a good experiment is that in one simple cut, you can eliminate all the complexity that makes it so hard to determine cause and effect.
it pays to be on the lookout for a “natural experiment,”
Lab experiments are invaluable in the hard sciences, in part because neutrinos and monads don’t change their behavior when they are being watched; but humans do.
Do expensive wines really taste better?
“the entire awards program was really just an advertising scheme.”
lot of obvious ideas are only obvious after the fact—after
The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don’t.
The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say “I don’t know”—and
But if you ask the wrong question, you are almost guaranteed to get the wrong answer.
We tend to pay attention to what other people say and, if their views resonate with us, we slide our perception atop theirs.
we tend to focus on the part of a problem that bothers us.
how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.
If these home-based inputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do.
When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.
whatever problem you’re trying to solve, make sure you’re not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.
scientists have found that even elite athletes can be tricked into improvement
“It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,”
Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.
It takes a truly original thinker to look at a problem that everyone else has already looked at and find a new avenue of attack.
rather than address their root causes, we often spend billions of dollars treating the symptoms and are left to grimace when the problem remains.
you should work terribly hard to identify and attack the root cause of problems.
poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
In countries whose political and economic institutions are built to serve the appetites of a corrupt few rather than the multitudes, food is routinely withheld from the people who need it most.
fixing corruption is a lot harder than airlifting food.
