There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanThe cardinal rule in academic research is to base your assertions on citable evidence rather than conjecture. This principle sets Perplexity apart from ChatGPT, which has the freedom to generate content without such constraints. Perplexity, by design, is restricted to sourcing information directly from the web, eschewing any reliance on pre-existing knowledge within the model.
You only get to really redesign markets root and branch when they are failing so dramatically that everyone acknowledges it. Markets are a little like language. It's hard to change the spelling of certain words in the English language, even though those spellings are dysfunctional.
causality runs from the latter to the former: in more unequal societies, the return to committing a crime increases, since there is more wealth to be taken away at each crime
Adversity is happening all around us at the individual level, it's happening at a company level, it's happening at industry levels; and we can either face it and learn from it or we can pretend it's not happening. And I think that is the key.
Wealth is just an indicator of how well (or not) things are going. Whatever I'm doing, there are indicators… do people like what I'm doing? Do they think I'm crazy? Am I making a lot of money? These are just indicators. Wealth is not and end in itself, it's just one of many indicator as to how you're doing.
We are the same people, physically: today, we have no additional neurons, no better wiring. But our tools for thinking – our ideas, hypotheses, theories, models – are marvellously improved. The only reason we are better at thinking and doing things now is that we accumulate knowledge and pass ideas and information from one generation to the next.
The real mystery is not why organisms as complicated as us age and die, but why there is a kind of immortality through the germ line! There clearly is some way that all the damaging aspects of life that feed into ageing are overcome in the germ line.
Mobile phones can really revolutionize the study of human behavior.
The wisdom I've gathered over the years taught me to seek out individuals who have a sense of reverence towards the job at hand. Rather than recruiting someone who assumes they've mastered it all, we seek those who regard their roles with awe. My experience has shown me the importance of hiring problem solvers and builders, not just those who impose pre-established templates.
We can use the pain of our past as a catapult propelling us forward. As the saying goes, 'the best revenge is a life well-lived.' So, the most gratifying way to spite all those who tried to harm me during my childhood is to say, 'Look at me now; I'm speaking to Vikas Shah, 50 years later.'
It's hard for people to defend democracy when it cannot defend them against social injustice.
You can go and build a schoolhouse in any village or community, but it will do nothing without impassioned and brilliant teachers. In many ways, the teacher is more important than the building because a good teacher can teach anywhere.