4 Quotes by Gregory Cochran

Anyhow, many people in the soft sciences are prone to be wrong because they’re crazy** some are dumb, too, but that’s another story.

Malcolm Gladwell can’t help being a pinhead. He was probably born that way.

The motto here is that sometimes the apparently inferior choice has a better upgrade path: Evolution can’t know this, and we aren’t particularly good at recognizing it ourselves. On the genetic level, it translates as follows: Natural selection may solve the same problems differently in different populations, and what appears to be the most elegant solution at the time may not in fact turn out to be the one that works best in the long run. The seemingly inferior choice.

About 2% of a population with an average IQ of 100 scores above IQ 130, about 0.1% above 145. For a population with an average of 85, only 0.1% will score above 130 – 20 times fewer.