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Einstein was deliberate in choosing which questions to tackle: In one of his more well-traveled quotes—which he may or may not have actually said—he reckoned that if he had an hour to solve a problem and his life depended on it, he’d spend the first fifty-five minutes making sure he was answering the right question. With so much evidence in its favor and with everyone from Einstein to Jobs in its corner, why, then, is questioning underappreciated in business, undertaught in schools, and underutilized in our everyday lives?
A More Beautiful Question
Warren Berger
Schrödinger argued that it is not only the gas laws that derive their accuracy from the statistical properties of large numbers; all the laws of classical physics and chemistry – including the laws governing the dynamics of fluids or chemical reactions – are based on this ‘averaging of large numbers’ or ‘order from disorder’ principle.
Life on the Edge
Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden
But in their recent article “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” the psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom took another look at the studies and found that people prefer unequal distributions, both among fellow participants in the lab and among citizens in their country, as long as they sense that the allocation is fair: that the bonuses go to harder workers, more generous helpers, or even the lucky winners of an impartial lottery.17 “There is no evidence so far,” the authors conclude, “that children or adults possess any general aversion to inequality.” People are content with economic inequality as long as they feel that the country is meritocratic, and they get angry when they feel it isn’t. Narratives about the causes of inequality loom larger in people’s minds than the existence of inequality. That creates an opening for politicians to rouse the rabble by singling out cheaters who take more than their fair share: welfare queens, immigrants, foreign countries, bankers, or the rich, sometimes identified with ethnic minorities.18
Enlightenment Now
Steven Pinker
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