Quotes from Cass R. Sunstein

Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.

when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.

We can believe in hierarchy. We can believe the universe was made just for us. Hierarchy and a major sense of entitlement are not insurmountable problems. The problem occurs when we treat those whom we believe lie beneath us as slaves. Religion once sustained human slavery. It was wrong then. When it blindly sanctions the slavery of every nonhuman animal, it is wrong now.

do not be misled by expert bravado or by an expert's own sense of how he or she is doing. Evidence is a much better guide than an impressive self-presentation.

Star Wars and Star Trek are good in different ways, and in fairness, you can't really rank them. But Star Wars is better. "YOUR

As Joseph Schumpeter remarked, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, but you can fool enough of the people for long enough to do irreversible damage.

How about 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7? Think about it for a minute. That approach has the advantage of giving you "I am your father," and of starting with the mysteries of the two best, while treating the prequels as kind of a flashback (as you're also focused on the cliffhanger ending of 5). Then you get to wrap everything up with the real finale, and the best, before the third trilogy starts. Not a bad idea at all. A

Economists suggest that we should assess the value of decisions in terms of two considerations: the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.

Janis believed that groups are especially likely to suffer from groupthink if they are cohesive, have highly directive leadership, and are insulated from experts.

If government is to respect people's autonomy, or to treat them with dignity, it should not deprive them of freedom. It should treat them as adults, rather than children or infants.

d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvements, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.

Asked to resolve problems in a language that is not their own, people are less likely to depart from standard accounts of rationality.

Or consider the fact that after people buy a new car, they often love to read advertisements that speak enthusiastically about the same car that they have just obtained. Those advertisements tend to be comforting because they confirm the wisdom of the decision to purchase that particular car. If you are a member of a particular political party or have strong convictions, you might want support, reinforcement, and ammunition, not criticism.

If we understand "rights" to be legal protection against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial.

Do musical preferences predict political inclinations? Not long ago, an official with Pandora said that its predictions about those inclinations, based on zip code as well as musical choices, are between 75 and 80 percent accurate. And with that level of accuracy, it developed an advertising service "that would enable candidates and political organizations to target the majority of its 73 million active monthly Pandora listeners based on its sense of their political leanings.

Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by social media, provide a form of social glue. A national holiday is a shared experience. So is a major sports event (the Olympics or the World Cup), or a movie that transcends individual and group differences (Star Wars is a candidate). So

it can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step.

They suggest that with respect to facts, partisan differences are much less sharp than they seem—and that political polarization is often an artifact of the survey setting.

By itself, partyism is not the most serious threat to democratic self-government. But if it decreases government's ability to solve serious problems, then it has concrete and potentially catastrophic consequences for people's lives. I

The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information.

You can become radicalized in the sense that you come to believe, firmly, a position that is within the political mainstream—for example, that your preferred political candidate is not just the best but immeasurably better than the alternatives, and that any other choice would be catastrophic.

It might also count as an insult to dignity, and a form of infantilization, if the government constantly reminds people of things that they already know.

In the United States both plates and portions have increased dramatically over time. A really good nudge would be to make them smaller.

This conception of representation appears throughout The Federalist Papers. No. 57 urges that: "The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.