Indeed, some of our apparent goals are not even really our goals—they are the metaphorical goals of our genes. The evolutionary process selects for genes that lead organisms to have as many surviving offspring as possible in the kinds of environments in which their ancestors lived. They do so by giving us motives like hunger, love, fear, comfort,

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By tapping preexisting intuitions and translating information into mind-friendly formats, it’s possible to hone people’s statistical reasoning. Hone we must. Risk literacy is essential for doctors, judges, policymakers, and others who hold our lives in their hands. And since we all live in a world in which God plays dice, fluency in Bayesian

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We have microscopes for the small, telescopes for the distant, photography for the past, lighting for the dark, remote sensing for the invisible. And as we sally into realms outside the envelope in which we evolved, like the very fast and the very high, believing our senses can be fatal. The judgments of depth and orientation that allow our brains

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When it comes to arguing against reason, as soon as you show up, you lose. Let’s say you argue that rationality is unnecessary. Is that statement rational? If you concede it isn’t, then there’s no reason for me to believe it—you just said so yourself. But if you insist I must believe it because the statement is rationally compelling, you’ve

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As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 People Escaped Extreme Poverty Yesterday every day for the past twenty-five years.33 But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a

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Blackstone’s 10:1 ratio is arbitrary, of course, but the lopsidedness is eminently defensible. In a democracy, freedom is the default, and government coercion an onerous exception that must meet a high burden of justification, given the awesome power of the state and its constant temptation to tyrannize. Punishing the innocent, particularly by

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A blindness to base rates also leads to public demands for the impossible. Why can’t we predict who will attempt suicide? Why don’t we have an early-warning system for school shooters? Why can’t we profile terrorists or rampage shooters and detain them preventively? The answer comes out of Bayes’s rule: a less-than-perfect test for a rare trait

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For instance, in most years between 1992 and 2015, an era that criminologists call the Great American Crime Decline, a majority of Americans believed that crime was rising.34 In their “Ignorance Project,” Hans and Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling-Rönnlund have shown that the understanding of global trends in most educated people is exactly backwards:

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“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison about the checks and balances in a democratic government, and that is how other institutions steer communities of biased and ambition-addled people toward disinterested truth. Examples include the adversarial system in law, peer review in science, editing and fact-checking in

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