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When people trust information to be true that isn’t, they end up with the illusion of knowledge—which is worse than having no knowledge at all.

Tim Urban • What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

Why do smart people act stupidly? What skills and dispositions are they missing that can explain these mistakes? And how can we cultivate those qualities

David Robson • The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

I concluded that what we call “intelligence” is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about “raw intellect.”

How to understand things

Neither intelligence nor empathy by themselves talks to motive. People can be highly intelligent and capable of tuning into how other people feel, but also be selfish. Selfishness sits at the heart of many of our troubles.

Paul Lawrence • The Wise Leader: A Practical Guide for Thinking Differently About Leadership

it’s hard to empirically quantify intelligence because it exists only relative to our expectations – expectations that are human and, moreover, individual to particular humans.

Abigail Desmond • Chaos and cause

The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”

Michael Lewis • The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

I also take issue with Chomsky’s comment that the human mind “seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.” Humans are experts at inferring brute correlations, so much so that they often manifest themselves as problematic biases and false narratives about how the world works.

Salman Khan • Brave New Words

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it

Robert Epstein • Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays

Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.