Our subconscious not only manages bodily systems but also performs processing of features in our experience that our conscious does not have time to process. This has been proven in lots of experiments where people have been given subconscious cues to help them solve problems, but the people are unaware of this and make up answers when asked to explain how they came to conclusions. It’s important to trust these judgments that seem to come out of nowhere, but if we try to explain them we’ll start trying to provide rational answers, which can be totally false or misleading.

We are extremely lucky to be here, and even more lucky to be able to appreciate it. Let’s not waste it.

This book is about empowering women by giving them the freedom to make their own choices and speak for themselves. She said some important things about stigma in society. She talked specifically about the stigma of not talking about birth control, but she made general statements too. It’s each person’s responsibility to work against stigma and stop the human tendency to cast out others. I need to spend more time thinking about my own stigmas and biases, so that I can help those who are marginalized.

An important question is how much we need to fight income inequality. Is it fair to have 35% growth in the upper class and 3% growth in the lower class? Where is a good balance? We have grown a lot richer since the Industrial Revolution, because we’ve become more productive. Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Globalization is good because it allows us to buy cheaper, better products. We can offset short-run job loss by paying or giving human capital to those who lose their jobs to globalization Policies often don’t do what we intend them to do, because they change people’s decisions for the involved choice.

Scientific thinking and religion go hand in hand, and help refine and give purpose to each other. Descartes’ approach wasn’t as good as Newton’s. Descartes relied on the soundness of his own reasoning. “The erroneous conception that revelation ended with the apostles promotes the misconception among sectarian religions that the Gospel is complete and that with a liberal admixture of human wisdom, all will be crystal clear.” God places messages in everything.