Being stupid by choice

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant... The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

Bailing out losers

If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can’t only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

Cooking is what makes us human.

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

Skepticism vs relativism

As Michael Rooney said, "The error here is similar to one I see all the time in beginning philosophy students: when confronted with reasons to be skeptics, they instead become relativists.  That is, when the rational conclusion is to suspend judgment about an issue, all too many people instead conclude that any judgment is as plausible as any other."