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Great Picture on Drug Development Targets
ByadminMatthew Herper and Erin Carlyle at Forbes magazine recently put together a wonderful picture, showing what kinds of diseases pharmaceutical companies are targeting now in developing new drugs. The bigger the bubble, the larger the number of drugs under development. Further to the right, the deadlier the disease. Makes for fascinating picture: Several things strike…
What Marathon Runners Have in Common with Used Car Salesmen
ByadminIn recent posts, I’ve presented several interesting pictures of how arbitrary thresholds influence behavior. I showed how airplane pilots speed up flights to make on-time arrivals, but don’t speed up late flights that won’t make it on time. I’ve shown that the price of used cars changes when the mileage on the odometer passes arbitrary round…
The Availability Heuristic
ByadminAs someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
Remember: Suicidal Killers Are Suicidal
ByadminIn the book review section of the New York Times, Andrew Solomon poses a reflection on Adam Lanza, the deranged elementary school shooter in Connecticut: “If we want to stem violence, we need to begin by stemming despair.” How we will stem either of these problems I don’t know. But what a great sentence!
On How Politics Creates Enemies
ByadminJohn Adams, second president of the United States, believed that politicians should refrain from talking too much in political settings: “A public speaker who inserts himself, or was urged by others into the conduct of affairs, by daily exertions to justify his measures and answer the objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the…
Thomas Jefferson on Political Disagreements
Byadmin“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” (Click here to view comments)