As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

Don't trust, just verify.

And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.