[b]Steven D. Levitt
If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don’t know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don’t even know the right question.[/b]
Actually, there are two:
1] ought one to live?
2] and, if yes, how ought one to live?
Are people innately altruistic? is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated–for good or ill–if only you find the right levers.
You know, like dogs.
Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially—with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect—are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.
Fake facts in particular.
The takeaway here is simple but powerful: just because you’re great at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything. Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a deep breath—ultracrepidarianism, or “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence".
No, really, Mr. Objectivist: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultracrepidarianism
Goalkeepers jump left 57 percent of the time and right 41 percent—which means they stay in the center only 2 times out of 100. A leaping keeper may of course still stop a ball aimed at the center, but how often can that happen? If only you could see the data on all penalty kicks taken toward the center of the goal! Okay, we just happen to have that: a kick toward the center, as risky as it may appear, is seven percentage points more likely to succeed than a kick to the corner. Are you willing to take the chance?
Any goalkeepers here? Let us know what happens.
The more social science we learn, the more we realize that people, while treasuring their independence, are in fact drawn to herd behavior in almost every aspect of daily life.
In other words, Know Thyself.
Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.
Yeah, that’s still around.