Modern world Quote by Rolf Dobelli

““If your hunter-gatherer buddies suddenly bolted, it made sense to follow suit—regardless of whether a saber-toothed tiger or a boar had startled them. If you failed to run away, and it turned out to be a tiger, the price of a first-degree error was death. On the other hand, if you had just fled from a boar, this lesser mistake would have cost you only a few calories. It paid to be wrong about the same things. Whoever was wired differently exited the gene pool after the first or second incidence. We are the descendants of those homines sapientes who tend to flee when the crowd does. But in the modern world, this intuitive behavior is disadvantageous. Today’s world rewards single-minded contemplation and independent action. Anyone who has fallen victim to stock market hype has witnessed that.””

Rolf Dobelli

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Modern world

More by Rolf Dobelli

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.

Rolf Dobelli

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“A second, parallel explanation of why our mistakes are so persistent took shape in the late 1990s: Our brains are designed to reproduce rather than search for the truth. In other words, we use our thoughts primarily to persuade. Whoever convinces others secures power and thus access to resources. Such assets represent a major advantage for mating and for rearing…

Rolf Dobelli

“A mathematician is afraid of flying due to the small risk of a terrorist attack. So, on every flight he takes a bomb with…

Rolf Dobelli

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“Trust your internal observations too much and too long, and you might be in for a very rude awakening. Second, we believe that our introspections are more reliable than those of others, which creates an illusion of superiority. Remedy: Be all the more critical with yourself. Regard your internal observations with the same skepticism as claims from some random person.…

Rolf Dobelli

“the typical response to scarcity is a lapse in clear thinking. Assess products and services solely on the basis of their price and benefits.…

Rolf Dobelli

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“The confirmation bias is alive and well in the business world. One example: An executive team decides on a new strategy. The team enthusiastically”

Rolf Dobelli

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“An unrealized loss isn't as painful as realized one.”

Rolf Dobelli

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If you spend fifteen minutes in a shopping mall, you will pass more people than our ancestors saw during their entire lifetimes.

Rolf Dobelli

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“In conclusion: Don’t cling to things. Consider your property something that the “universe” (whatever you believe this to be) has bestowed to you temporarily.…

Rolf Dobelli

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“The sunk cost fallacy is most dangerous when we have invested a lot of time, money, energy, or love in something. This investment becomes…

Rolf Dobelli

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“Our school system is largely geared toward the set-up: the emphasis on factual knowledge and certifications makes it seem like life is primarily about getting the best possible grades and giving our careers the best possible jump-start. Yet the connection between degrees and workplace success is growing ever more tenuous, while the ability to self-correct is growing ever more important—even…

Rolf Dobelli

“Wir sollten darauf achten, einer Erfahrung nur so viel Weisheit zu entnehmen, wie in ihr steckt - mehr nicht.”

Rolf Dobelli

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More Modern world quotes

Like a child exploring the attic of an old house on a rainy day, discovering a trunk full of treasure and then calling all his brothers and sisters to share the find, Richard J. 'Foster has 'found' the spiritual disciplines that the modern world has stored away and forgot, and has excitedly called us to celebrate them. For they are,…

Eugene H. Peterson

In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American…

P. J. O'Rourke

“Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. [...] The first thing to observe about the moderate’s retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God’s utterances difficult to…

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“Virtually all letter writers confessed how their encounter with Nietzsche's philosophy either emboldened or chastened them, liberated them from old falsehoods, or saddled them with new moral responsibilities. Helen Bachmuller of Dayton, Ohio, wrote to let Förster-Nietzsche know that her brother had inspired the belief that human greatness was still possible in the modern world. Though unworthy of his greatness,…

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

So-called Western Civilization, as practised in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history…

P. J. O'Rourke

“She’d thought Troy stank: the corpse piles, the fires, the fish guts thoughtfully left out for the gods—gee fucking thanks, guys, just what we want—and the stupid Achaeans stomping around on the beach, refusing to wash, letting the blood cook to black in the sun and rust the joints of their armor. That was nothing compared to the inescapable reek…

Stephen King

“People aren't crazy, they’re just reacting normally to an abnormally crazy world.”

J.S.B. Morse

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Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.

Bill Bryson

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“Critical thinking is an unavoidable part of growing up. We do not become adults without it. But in the modern world, this stage often corrodes religious belief. Modern Western ways of thinking are very much shaped by the identification of truth with factuality. And generally accepted modern knowledge calls into question the factuality of much of the Bible and of…

Marcus J. Borg

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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“And while [we] do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it's important to remember that our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble. We are susceptible to emotional uncertainties and neuroses that are probably not very common among the Hmong, but that run rampant these days among my contemporaries…

Elizabeth Gilbert