From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's an Overton window of policies you can make, but it's a wider window than the policies you can run your political campaign on. It's more a matter of legislators than politicians -- even though they're the same people.
We don't fail because we make mistakes; mistakes can be fixed. We fail because we quit. And we quit because belief collapsed, not because the strategy was wrong.
It's quite hard to effectively ban something in Europe that's available legally in California. Often bans that are porous put up barriers that primarily affect the poor more than the rich.
We wouldn't like there to be any heroin in society, but there's plenty of heroin. So our discussion can't just concern our moral feelings about drug addiction. It has to involve our consequential feelings about prisons, overdose deaths, and the effect on communities. You can't escape consequences when you talk about the world.
A repugnant transaction has fans as well as foes. When I call something repugnant, I'm not saying I oppose it, or that you should -- only that it has opponents who raise objections primarily on moral grounds.
Banning a market in which some people nevertheless want to participate may be the first step in designing the illegal black market that will emerge.
The test for any belief isn't whether it makes you feel good. It's whether it makes you better at engaging with reality. That's not self-help. That's applied science.
Robert Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize for IVF. By then, millions of children had been born through it. On the very day his Nobel was announced, the Vatican said giving him the prize was 'completely out of order'. Same person, same achievement, same day -- celebrated as a saviour by some, condemned as a murderer by others. That is what a real moral controversy looks like. It doesn't dissolve, even after the technology has changed millions of lives.
The phrase 'seeing is believing' has it exactly backwards. The research shows that believing is seeing.
It's like a tripod. Without one of the three, the whole marketing strategy collapses.
If the sixty hours of capacity was always there in those rats — what are we writing off as fixed limits in human beings that are actually just locked potential waiting for the right belief?
Strategy is, in large part, institutionalised belief. The question is whether your organisation has any mechanism for examining those beliefs — or whether they're just the water everyone swims in, invisible and unquestioned.