Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes

I felt the need to unlearn my formal education.

We do but learn to-day what our better advanced judgements will unteach us tomorrow.

For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

No one has a monopoly on truth, and science continues to advance. Yesterday's heresies may be tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

Sometimes there is no sugar-coating it. Sometimes you have to challenge people's belief systems in a progressive way.

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

The only way to move forward on this is to ask yourself, "What would happen if everything I thought was 'wrong' was actually 'right'?"

Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

My approach to creating content is focused on pulling people out of their intellectual comfort zones. I'm interested in presenting ideas in unique ways that challenge people to question their assumptions.

I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift.

Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions.

It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently. I've written this book, and I don't think differently.

I like to go after the foibles, basically of beliefs that are held without question. If people still want to believe in their stuff after that, that's great - as long as they just have a chance to step back and look at it for a second. Sometimes, you don't even realize what you've been thinking for 20 years.

The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do not fit within our little moulds. If necessary, we must remake the moulds.

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.

It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world.