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All Quotes by author - Stephen J. Dubner
" If I make the mistake of eating breakfast, I want to go back to bed and/or eat again immediately. "
Breakfast
Bed
Eating
" If the day's writing has been particularly good or particularly bad, a glass of scotch will be involved. "
Good
Glass
Day
" If the world gets a lot hotter in a hurry and the primary aim is to cool it down, then the current plan of carbon mitigation will almost certainly not be effective. It'll be too little, too late, and too optimistic - in large part because the atmospheric half-life of CO2 is roughly 100 years. "
Down
Late
Plan
" I like to bring my kids to the voting booth to show them how it works. I'll let them draw their own conclusions as to how worthwhile it is. "
Like
Show
Kids
" I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for my whole adult life. "
Life
Writer
Journalist
" I think the most fundamental error we make is mistaking a noisy, anomalous event for the norm. This happens all the time - in the stock market, in reports of crime and natural disaster, etc. The fact is that big, noisy, anomalous events catch our attention because they're anomalous, which isn't a problem in and of itself. "
Problem
Time
Fact
" I was a math and science kid in school, but I ended up going the route of writing and music in college. "
Music
Writing
Science
" Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head. "
She
Sister
Look
" Of all the things that the digital revolution has produced, once of the coolest, simplest ones is you can now contact people who write books that you read. You used to have to write a letter to the publisher and hope they passed it along, which they never did. "
You
Hope
Digital
" One of the strangest unintended consequences of abortion, of legalized abortion, was that it drives the crime rate down because what abortion really was, was a mechanism for which fewer unwanted children could be born. "
Children
Born
Abortion
" People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We've heard about a lot - doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness. "
Heard
Wrong
Wellness
" Set aside a half hour or an hour to rethink the way you make decisions, the habits you have, the biases you may have. And if you think of things, if you come with a little bit of a blank slate and be willing to acknowledge what you don't know, and you'd be willing to think like a child, I think it'll help not only individuals but society at large. "
Decisions
Think
Society
" Statistics on religious affiliation are notoriously slippery: the government isn't allowed to gather such data, and the membership claims of religious organizations aren't entirely reliable. "
Statistics
Membership
Government
" That's what's good about the digital revolution is it makes information asymmetry much harder to maintain. "
Information
Revolution
Good
" The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be. "
More
His
Matter
" The movement toward choosing religion, rampant as it is, shouldn't be surprising. Ours is an era marked by the desire to define - or redefine - ourselves. "
Movement
Religion
Desire
" The world is complicated. But does every problem require a complicated solution? "
World
Complicated
Problem
" Think small. Don't pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of 'Think Like a Freak,' really. "
You
Think
Small
" We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems. "
Live
Problems
You
" We're surrounded by big problems and people who have been attacking the same big problems for years and years and years and years, and often they're not getting anywhere. "
Same
Big
Been
" We took our Catholicism very seriously. We never missed Mass; our father was a lector, and both our parents taught catechism. At 3 in the afternoon on Good Friday, we gathered in the living room for 10 minutes of silence in front of a painting of the Crucifixion. "
Silence
Parents
Painting
" We've been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of failure. How do we know that that's true? "
Failure
Been
True
" What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?' "
Ideas
Back
Boring
" What would you rather do? Fix a small problem well or answer a small problem well or flail around at the big ones and pay a lot of lip service? "
Pay
Problem
Service
" When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body. "
Think
Someone
Trying
" While in the middle of writing a book, I have a hard time reading other books for pleasure. "
Time
Writing
Pleasure
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