Richard Nisbett
The Strategist
The long view, patient, analytical, playing several moves ahead.
Richard Nisbett reads as The Strategist because his life's work is cartographic in ambition, charting how cultural and historical forces shape the cognitive routes through which entire civilisations approach reality. He does not catalogue human difference for its own sake.
“But if I just sit down for 10 minutes and say, well, what are the main points I want this material to make and what would I do if somebody raises a particular point? How would I deflect the discussion in that direction and so on?”
“My favorite example of somebody not using the law of large numbers and not understanding that the more variable the dimension you're looking at, the more data it's important to have to make a judgment. And this comes from what I went for the first time to Europe.”
“About what they're doing because they've forgotten some of the stuff they learned in books in a conscious way. And it's precisely because their masters is that they've invented it. They've induced certain rules that they're following, but they're hopeless. An example, an even simpler example is language. We don't know what grammar is.”
“When I was doing that work, I used to say, you know, not only are we stupid, but you can't make us smarter with these things. So one day I said, well, you know, I'm going to prove that. I mean, I don't actually know for a fact that, you know, you can't teach people these things.”
Masters in Business: “Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast)”
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