As a result, like any social species, we need to engage in ostensibly ‘nonsensical’ behaviour if we wish to reliably convey meaning to other members of our species.

If you want to change people’s behaviour, listening to their rational explanation for their behaviour may be misleading, because it isn’t ‘the real why’.

Highly educated people don’t merely use logic; it is part of their identity. When I told one economist that you can often increase the sales of a product by increasing its price, the reaction was one not of curiosity but of anger.

the problem is that when ‘the rules are the same for everyone’ the same boring bastards win every time.

Many things which do not make sense in a logical context suddenly make perfect sense if you consider what they mean rather than what they are.

And yet no one can deny that the drink has been wildly successful – after all, profits from the six billion cans sold annually are sufficient to fund a Formula 1 team on the side.

meaning is conveyed by the things we do that are not in our own short-term self-interest – by the costs that we incur and the risks we take.

Evolution does not care about objectivity – it only cares about fitness.

We assume that the progress must appear as neat in the moment as it can be made to seem in retrospect, and we want ideas to be as straightforward in their formulation as in their analysis