Quotes from Tim Harford

Selalu ada sesuatu yang dapat dipelajari dari orang lain

enough pieces of cheese and you can be fairly sure that the

Los dispositivos digitales evitan errores pequeños pero preparan el terreno para grandes errores».

Swiss cheese model' of accidents. Imagine a series of safety

So whenever a new technology emerges, it's worth trying to ask who will win and who will lose out as a result. The answer can often surprise us.

Perilaku kita yang rasional sering kali menjadi senjata makan tuan secara sosial. Tetapi perilaku kita yang rasional juga menghasilkan keajaiban

According to one story, Von Neumann was asked to assist with the design of a new supercomputer, required to solve a new and important mathematical problem which was beyond the capacities of existing supercomputers. He asked to have the problem explained to him, solved it in moments with pen and paper and then turned down the request. Von

There's little public clamor to judge people not by the color of their passport but by the content of their character.

In 1775, Cumming patented the S-bend. This became the missing ingredient to create the flushing toilet—and, with it, public sanitation as we know it. Flushing toilets had previously foundered on the problem of smell: the pipe that connects the toilet to the sewer, allowing urine and feces to be flushed away, will also let sewer odors waft back up—unless you can create some kind of airtight seal.

Switching costs can be psychological, too – a result of brand loyalty.

But the change in tone also reflects a change in the zeitgeist between 2013 and 2016. In 2013, the relatively few people who were paying attention to big data often imagined themselves to be the carpenters; by 2016, many of us had realized that we were nails.

Premature enumeration is not just an intellectual failure. Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy too.

isn't the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk:

Net wealth is a great way to measure riches, but not such a good way to measure poverty. Lots of people have zero, or less than zero. Some of them are destitute; others, like the junior doctor, are going to be fine.

wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He started by taking apart a

gamble in a wartime prison camp should serve as an example to the staff of the World Bank today. We'll discover what the disasters at Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon have to tell us about preventing another Lehman Brothers crisis. We'll learn from a watchmaker

States should be humble. Bureaucrats must recognise the limits of their knowledge. There is always a risk that the bird's eye view is so grand and sweeping as to induce delusions of omnipotence.

If we want to make the world add up, we need to ask questions -- open-minded, genuine questions. And once we start asking them, we may find it is delightfully difficult to stop.

The Target algorithm hadn't produced a superhuman leap of logic, but a very human one: it figured out exactly what you or I or anyone else would also have figured out, given the same information.

los márgenes comerciales del café rondan el 150 por ciento; cuesta 40 centavos preparar una taza de café de máquina de un dólar, y menos de un dólar preparar un café cortado que se vende a 2,55 dólares. De

Hearing the anecdote, it's easy to assume that Target's algorithms are infallible—that everybody receiving coupons for onesies and wet wipes is pregnant. But nobody ever claimed that it was true.

We can make two predictions, though. First, the more human inventiveness we encourage, the better that's likely to work out for us.

If it had been up to Von Neumann's purely intellectual reasoning alone, many of the bombs he helped to create would have exploded on the Soviet Union.Thankfully, there was another thinker on hand whose deeper grasp of human foibles added a new dimension to game theory that, among other things, helped save the world from mutually assured destruction. Enter Thomas Schelling.

And, second, with any new invention, it makes sense to at least ask ourselves how we might maximise the benefits and mitigate the risks.