We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Stephen J. Dubner Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
Think small. Don’t pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of ‘Think Like a Freak,’ really.
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.
If we want politics to be the kind of arena where you’re attracting and encouraging really competent people who do a job well because that’s what they’re supposed to do, then you have to pay them a salary that’s commensurate with that.
Cancer is, in general, an increasingly important topic, in part because we’ve gotten so good at preventing other forms of death that cancer, despite some gains made against it, is becoming even more prominent.
Spielberg may have intended ‘Schindler’s List’ as the opposite of entertainment, but the film grossed $321 million and engaged audiences as only entertainment can, coaxing them to cry and shudder, leaving their hearts more heavy than broken.
Religion is a way to make order from chaos, and I think economics is not dissimilar. In religion and in economics, you’re trying to figure out the way we perceive the world and move through it, and that’s what I like to learn.
The things you think that really change your life a lot, don’t.
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.
We’ve been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of failure. How do we know that that’s true?
I was a math and science kid in school, but I ended up going the route of writing and music in college.
If we treated politics like more of a profession, like it should be, we would all be a lot better off.
I’m a writer. I’ve been a journalist for my whole adult life.
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.
It’s amazing how unwilling most people are to admit they don’t know the answer to a question or a problem and instead charge forward on a ‘gut instinct’ that turns out to be crap.
What’s really the driver of talent is not raw ability. It’s not even just experience. It’s what’s called ‘deliberate practice,’ which is to say, if you do something a lot, you get really good at it.
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.
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?
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.
I love sports, and I love playing sports.
A lot of people are scared of experimentation because they think you have to be scientists, or they’re also scared of it because it means that you have to admit that you don’t know the answer. A lot of people like to assume they know the solution to a problem when they don’t.
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.
I believe that people generally want to be what we call good. They want to cooperate with people. They don’t want to steal; they don’t want to cheat. But everybody has a price. Everybody has an incentive.
Deflategate. I mean it’s kind of idiotic in one way. On the other hand, look how totally obsessed we are with the fact that the New England Patriots may have taken, I don’t know, a half-pound or a pound square inch of air pressure out of the footballs. We love it.
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.
People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We’ve heard about a lot – doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness.
