Word: smartness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lathing the parts for all these new plans and welding them together is a bleary-eyed workforce of card-carrying Smart People. They come from the best universities and think tanks. One Cabinet member, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, has a Nobel Prize in physics. (See who's who in Obama's White House...
...thing to remember about smart people is how dumb they can be. Thousands, maybe millions, of IQ points went into creating a market for magical mortgage bonds that could only go up in value. Whoops...
...built in. As luck would have it, that's precisely the kind of operation the Founders created with their slow-moving clockwork of checks and balances. But in times like these - periods of crisis and one-party rule - skepticism and dissent can seem unpatriotic, and the flawed ideas of smart people can easily get out of hand...
...Examples from Socrates to Sherlock Holmes teach us from an early age that smart people master their emotions and suffer no blind spots. Classic economic theory extends this fallacy, says Duke University's Dan Ariely, by maintaining that people and institutions rationally "weigh the costs and benefits of every decision in order to optimize the outcome...
...Perhaps the most influential work in this field was done by Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky in the 1970s and '80s. The partners developed a number of experiments that proved even smart people will arrive at wrong answers to fairly simple questions, depending on how information is presented to them. In one example, they told test subjects about a woman named Linda, who "is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright." They added that Linda "majored in philosophy," "was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination" and "participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations...