explained in bestsellers like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I’ve alluded to these cognitive infirmities in earlier chapters: the way we estimate probability from available anecdotes, project stereotypes onto individuals, seek confirming and ignore disconfirming evidence, dread harms and losses, and reason from teleology and voodoo resemblance rather than mechanical cause and effect.5 But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the
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