Why Is Thinking Clearly So Difficult? - Tim Harford - #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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Timestamps:

(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

Extra Stuff:

Check out Tim's website - https://timharford.com/ 

Buy Tim's book - https://amzn.to/3DNELvw 

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