From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The process of problem definition is a discipline that we rarely teach or learn. It is one of the most important things that we can invest our time in. What are the true underlying causes of a problem? How are people really affected?
When you're a child, you define your team as those wearing the same jerseys and your team's goal is to defeat anyone wearing different jerseys. But as you get older, your notion of what constitutes a team evolves.
If we consider the United States, where potentially 40 million people could discover through brain imaging or blood tests that they have amyloid in their brains, the question arises: how can healthcare systems afford to provide a $100,000 per year therapy to so many people? It's simply not feasible.
Children are the future of humanity. If we cannot protect our children, if we cannot ensure their rights, their education, their protection from exploitation, then we are failing humanity itself.
The evidence is that 50% of young heroin users who are under 19 will die by the age of 50. It's a terrible danger. People with alcohol problems have got a full 400% increase in expectation of death, than people without alcohol problems.
We typically advise families to be very cautious about engaging with social media. Information found there can often be based on assumptions, leading to wildly inaccurate theories that only heighten anxiety for those following the situation. The key is to have someone knowledgeable and understanding by your side—someone who can interpret the situation and provide support throughout this trying experience.
the share of the population in the top tercile is negatively associated with crime. When crime increases twofold the share of the rich tercile drops by 1.3%. In addition, we see that the share of the population in the poorest tercile increases with crime
Power requires oppression. In order to be powerful, you have to stand upon something. Strength comes from within. We are seeing the emergence of new political organisms with strength not power at the core. From Moscow to Hong Kong and India to the United States, powerless organisations are creating strong governance without power.
People underestimate their personal probability of encountering negative …it is not so much that individuals believe that negative events will not happen, but rather that these events are relatively unlikely to happen to them.
We now have religion based not on theology but on sociology. In principle, that's not a bad thing, but when your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it (which was Marx's dictem), you've got a problem.
Being an entrepreneur is no harder than working for someone else; it's simply a different experience. I completely agree that the whole narrative of entrepreneurship being excessively hard is exaggerated and fundamentally untrue.
The idea that education can reduce resistance to innovation is often informed by the misguided view that people oppose new technologies because of ignorance. This is not the case.