Simone Barbera

“we compared a sampling of successful and unsuccessful fairy tales in the famous Brothers Grimm collection. Successful (widely known) fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, had just two or three counterintuitive violations. Unsuccessful ones (have you heard of the Donkey Lettuce?) had none, or in other cases, quite the opposite—they had far too many violations. Successful counterintuitive representations and stories were also likely to generate emotional responses, like fear, and encouraged additional inferences.25 These kinds of memory biases play an important role in religious belief.26 The extraordinary agents endemic to religions appear to possess a particularly evocative set of abilities not shared by ordinary beings. They can be invisible; they can see things from afar; they can move through physical objects. This minimal counterintuitiveness is memorable, giving these concepts an advantage in cultural transmission. These departures from common sense are systematic but not radical enough to rupture meaning completely. As Sperber has put it, these minimal counterintuitions are relevant mysteries: they are closely connected to background knowledge, but do not admit to a final interpretation.”
― Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict

“In the ultimatum game, it is very common to see fifty-fifty splits. Pretty intuitive. It is also common to see that when the first subject offers too little, say one or two dollars, her partner rejects the offer. Again, intuitive. And it makes sense: after all, our sense of justice is designed to prevent people from walking all over us, and when they do, we must strike back (see Chapter 14). The experiment is working beautifully: our sense of justice is nicely spilling over to this silly little game. But”
― Moshe Hoffman, Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behaviour

“For thousands of years priests, rabbis and muftis explained that humans cannot overcome famine, plague and war by their own efforts. Then along came the bankers, investors and industrialists, and within 200 years managed to do exactly that.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“The difference between Victorian liberals and Soviet Communists should now be clear. Nature, in the form of a new pathogen, played a much larger role in the Irish Famine. The Ukrainian Holodomor, by contrast, was largely man-made and with malice aforethought.”
― Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe