Why Is Thinking Clearly So Difficult? - Tim Harford | Modern Wisdom Podcast 548

Tim Harford is an economist, associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a journalist and an author.

Humans need to be able to accurately judge the world around them. With more information than ever, this should be getting easier by the year and yet clear thinking seems to be ever more elusive. Why are we so prone to biases and what are some of the biggest rationality blunders from history?

Expect to learn why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got obsessed with photos of fairies, what everyone misunderstands about inflation, the danger indiscriminate doubt and reflexive cynicism, the similarities between magic and misinformation, why smart people get hijacked by ideology and much more...

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#humannature #economics #psychology

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00:00 Intro
02:00 Innovations from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz & Rory Sutherland
11:50 What People Get Wrong About Inflation
17:40 The Laziness of Toxic Cynicism
25:05 How the Pandemic Impacted Trust in Experts
30:08 Negative Consequences of Growing Skepticism
34:39 How Magic Links with Misinformation
39:55 Effectiveness of Using Intuition & Feeling
51:13 Lessons from the Invention of the Bicycle
1:00:31 Introducing Tax Incentives for Having Babies
1:11:44 Where to Find Tim

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