“Meaningful and moral are different in an interesting sense; something can be meaningful, and yet be morally terrible. Adolf Eichmann was clearly engaged in what he thought was a meaningful pursuit, perhaps he was even in a state of flow, thinking that what he was doing was 'good' – even though he was the architect of the death of millions.”— Paul Bloom
The quote archive
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
Too often when we find someone disagreeing with us, our question is about why. Why do you believe this ridiculous thing? What tends to work better is a how question... This kind of approach helps to view the real complexity of a situation and reveals gaps in knowledge.
— Adam GrantOrganizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential
The scientist mindset says, I will not let my ideas become an ideology. When I start to form an opinion, I should treat it as a hypothesis before doing some observations or experiments to test it. I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right.
— Adam GrantOrganizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential
Any time you get angry, frustrated or disappointed, it's worth remembering that those emotions are just a first draft. You would never publish a draft version of your blog, right? The same is true of emotion- a lot of people just go ahead and 'publish' – internalising how they feel – without stopping for a second and thinking that maybe they ought to do a revision.
— Adam GrantOrganizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential
I felt strongly that search- as a product- was just going to continue to face more and more revenue pressure, forcing us to show more and more ads, and inevitably making the product worse over time.
— Sridhar RamaswamyFormer Google Executive & Founder of Perplexity AI
Search started as a free product meaning it cannot get any less expensive for the user. You pay nothing, but the benefits of reaching larger and larger portions of humanity accrue to the provider, not to you.
— Sridhar RamaswamyFormer Google Executive & Founder of Perplexity AI
In the long-term there is no way to reconcile the conflict of interest between serving the user and the advertiser.
— Sridhar RamaswamyFormer Google Executive & Founder of Perplexity AI
I didn't like the rampant tracking and the fact that Google and Facebook effectively ran some of the largest information gathering networks on earth (and that's a very charitable way of describing it).
— Sridhar RamaswamyFormer Google Executive & Founder of Perplexity AI
Thanks to monetary policy, business cycles are far less volatile today than they were in the 19th century, when we had huge swings. But if cryptocurrency takes over the way its proponents would like, we could return to the ups and downs of the pre-monetary policy era.
— Prof. Eric MaskinNobel Prize Laureate in Economics; Mechanism Design Theory Pioneer
Even more seriously, cryptocurrency can interfere with governments' ability to fight recessions with monetary policy. When people are using privately created money (cryptocurrency) rather than ordinary money, the money supply is beyond the government's control, and monetary policy can no longer be conducted. That's a bad thing.
— Prof. Eric MaskinNobel Prize Laureate in Economics; Mechanism Design Theory Pioneer
The potential for blockchain is to accelerate the digitization of financial markets. Blockchain gets everyone excited as it has the potential to convene these different parties together to reach the necessary agreements, in that sense it is a unique enabler, a coordination mechanism. That has massive implications on the structure of our financial markets.
— Michel RauchsWith blockchain, you may not even need to bring someone to court, because the evidence is already there- on the blockchain! Producers can sell their products and services to people they don't know and need not trust—- so that expands their market.
— Prof. Eric MaskinNobel Prize Laureate in Economics; Mechanism Design Theory Pioneer
There are two key features of blockchain that make it, potentially, a very useful technology from an economic perspective. First, the data about transactions are posted on many public sites thus giving these data an immutability that makes disputes easy to avoid. Second, although the data are in some sense public, they can be encrypted so that a particular party learns only those aspects that she needs to know.
— Prof. Eric MaskinNobel Prize Laureate in Economics; Mechanism Design Theory Pioneer
We have to leave behind the myth that our economies are actually fit for the present that we understand, and the vision of the future we want to create. We need to redesign economics for our times.
— Kate RaworthCreator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development
We are, in the early days of the 21st century, talking about the death of the living world as an environmental externality. That alone should be an alarm-bell that our framework doesn't serve our time.
— Kate RaworthCreator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development
The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and the market doesn't even things out. It takes massive state intervention through public services, health services, social housing and income redistribution to even begin to equalise or reduce inequality.
— Kate RaworthCreator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development
GDP only catches a slice of the value that we value. It captures what goes on in the market, the financial value of goods and services sold in an economy over a year. We need to get away from the narrow, monetary, measure of GDP which asserts that economic value is the only thing we care about.
— Kate RaworthCreator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development