We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems.
If the world gets a lot hotter in a hurry and the primary aim is to cool it down, then the current plan of carbon mitigation will almost certainly not be effective. It'll be too little, too late, and too optimistic - in large part because the atmospheric half-life of CO2 is roughly 100 years.
Set aside a half hour or an hour to rethink the way you make decisions, the habits you have, the biases you may have. And if you think of things, if you come with a little bit of a blank slate and be willing to acknowledge what you don't know, and you'd be willing to think like a child, I think it'll help not only individuals but society at large.
The world is complicated. But does every problem require a complicated solution?
When certain people have certain beliefs, they can be unyielding, and that's really what faith is. There's a large place in the world for faith, but when it comes to a scientific, political, and economic issue, dogma is not a very good place to start.
Cancer is, in general, an increasingly important topic, in part because we've gotten so good at preventing other forms of death that cancer, despite some gains made against it, is becoming even more prominent.
Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.
The movement toward choosing religion, rampant as it is, shouldn't be surprising. Ours is an era marked by the desire to define - or redefine - ourselves.
Spielberg may have intended 'Schindler's List' as the opposite of entertainment, but the film grossed $321 million and engaged audiences as only entertainment can, coaxing them to cry and shudder, leaving their hearts more heavy than broken.
What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?'
While in the middle of writing a book, I have a hard time reading other books for pleasure.
A lot of people are scared of experimentation because they think you have to be scientists, or they're also scared of it because it means that you have to admit that you don't know the answer. A lot of people like to assume they know the solution to a problem when they don't.
If we want politics to be the kind of arena where you're attracting and encouraging really competent people who do a job well because that's what they're supposed to do, then you have to pay them a salary that's commensurate with that.
Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people. And so I think that if you had better data, there'd be no one more in favor of it than law abiding gun owners because they don't want to be smeared and lumped in with the criminals who use guns.
One of the strangest unintended consequences of abortion, of legalized abortion, was that it drives the crime rate down because what abortion really was, was a mechanism for which fewer unwanted children could be born.
Religion is a way to make order from chaos, and I think economics is not dissimilar. In religion and in economics, you're trying to figure out the way we perceive the world and move through it, and that's what I like to learn.
If I make the mistake of eating breakfast, I want to go back to bed and/or eat again immediately.
We've been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of failure. How do we know that that's true?
What's really the driver of talent is not raw ability. It's not even just experience. It's what's called 'deliberate practice,' which is to say, if you do something a lot, you get really good at it.
Cows and other ruminants are worse polluters than all of the transportation in the world, so all of us who try to cut down our carbon footprint by lessening our transportation would do far better by just consuming less beef.
