Making Better Decisions, The Sophomore Jinx, & The Illusion of Objectivity with Dr. Richard Nisbett

In this episode we discuss the errors people make in their reasoning and how to correct them, we explain a number of statistical principles to help sharpen your thinking and make you a better decision maker, why every $1 spent on a “scared straight” program creates $400 of cost for the criminal justice system, the illusion of objectivity, why you should NOT rely on your intuition and much more with Dr. Richard Nisbett.      Dr. Richard Nisbett is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He has been awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychology Association, the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Scientific Achievements, and the Donald T. Campbell Award for Distinguished Research in Social Psychology, among others. He is the author of the recent book Mindware, as well as The Geography of Thought, Think Differently, and Intelligence and How To Get It.   The errors people make in their reasoning and how to correct themHow to apply the lessons of statistics to making better decisionsIs your intelligence fixed and unchangeable?How the industrial revolution massively transformed the way people thinkWe discuss the skills, not on an IQ test, that you must have to be able to function effectively in today’s ageWhy job interviews are totally useless and have almost no correlation to job performance How misunderstanding the law of large numbers can lead you to make huge mistakesWhy does the rookie of the year almost always have a worse performance the following year?Understanding regression to the mean and how it creates extremely counterintuitive conclusionsWhy Performance = Skill + Luck Why deterministic thinking can drastically mislead you in finding the root cause of a phenomenaWe explain a number of statistical principles to help sharpen your thinking and make you a better decision makerThe concept of "base rates" and how they can transform how you think about realityWe walk through a number of concrete examples of how misunderstanding statistics can