We weight the things that could kill us now more heavily than the things that could kill us in the future. A terrorist can kill us right now, but eating too much McDonald’s won’t kill us for a few decades.

• Chances are, we’ve all been cheated at one point or another, probably by a repairman who overcharged us or an expert who gave us bad advice. Experts have an informational advantage over the average person.
• Experts often abuse information asymmetry b...

• Steven debunks the myth that drug dealers are all rich. In reality, crack gangs are very similar in structure to any business in corporate America, with a small number of people on the top making big money and hundreds of people on the bottom barely scraping by at all.
• These people ...

If we feel in control, we view things as safer. We prefer to drive a car than fly, even though there are far more deaths from car crashes than from plane crashes. When we’re in the driver’s seat we feel in control, but in a plan we relinquish all control to the pilot, so it feels riskier.

• Parents are more afraid of gun than of swimming pool. But there is 1 child drowning per every 11,000 backyard pools (550 drownings per year from 6 million pools) compared with 1 child killed for every 1,000,000+ guns (175 child deaths per year from 200m+ guns in the US).
• By these num...

• Because of high-stakes testing, schoolteachers in Chicago public schools were incentivized to change their students' answers on test answer sheets so that they would not be fired or penalized for the poor test scores.
• Similarly, sumo wrestlers in Japan are incentiviz...

We see the news stories of the horrific plane crashing into the side of a mountain or the kid playing with a gun that accidentally goes off, so these feel more likely compared to the guy who fell asleep in a car and quietly veers off the road or the child who drowns in the pool without any news c...

• Parenting methods that entail specific actions (such as taking one’s child to museums, spanking the child, reading to the child every night, etc.) play little to no role in the child’s development, whereas there are many parental qualities (such as the parents’ level of education, their age ...

• Stetson Kennedy, a man who infiltrated the 1940s KKK and published much of their secret information, thereby erasing the informational advantage they had that made people fear them.
• Real estate agents also have an informational advantage over their c...