Ironically, within a few minutes after my news feed told me that Jonah Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker, my articles-to-read randomizer plucked out this piece from June titled “Why Smart People Are Stupid”, which begins with an apology that Lehrer self-plagiarized the beginning of the piece.

FWIW, I think Lehrer is a smart writer and I’m going to miss his long-form pieces. I don’t necessarily think there’s a correlation between fabulizing a quote and the accuracy of the overall piece, hence the link.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.

Corollary: smart people are more likely to trust these shortcuts, IMO.