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Best Quote Ever on Pop Psychology Perils: Why We’re All Just Self-Delusion Machines

By Gary Stix 

January 8, 2012
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Best Quote Ever on Pop Psychology Perils: Why We’re All Just Self-Delusion Machines

Tyler Cowen

This is a quote from a 2009 TED talk by Tyler Cowen, a George Mason economist and a New York Times columnist. I found it via a recent Why We Reason blog. Maybe you’ve all seen it. But even if you have, it bears repeating. I want to print it and frame it. (Read the whole transcript, such cool stuff):

“There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book… [they are] all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don’t these books tell us that? It’s because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you’re learning about some of your biases, but you’re making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias.”

Source: Wikimedia Commons

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