"All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal."

"There is an important lesson in evaluating human behavior: never denigrate a behavior as irrational until you have considered what purpose it really serves."

"It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors."

"People who are not skilled at mathematics tend to view the output of second-rate mathematicians with a high level of credulity and attach almost mystical significance to their findings. Bad maths is the palmistry of the twenty-first century."

"Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational. If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary and jaywalkers will be able to march into the road, forcing the driverless car to stop suddenly, at great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be ‘angry’, and to occasionally maliciously fail to stop in time and strike the pedestrian on the shins."

"No living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured, and proportionate manner."

"For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead, it needs to concentrate on what people feel."

"All big data comes from the same place: the past. Yet a single change in context can change human behaviour significantly."

"Rory’s Rules of Alchemy: The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Don’t design for average. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club. Dare to be trivial. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it."

"What matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal."

"Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made."

"We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology."

"The number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used."

"Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience."

"Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works."

"It is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong."

"And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act:"

"When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic."

"It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past. A new campaigning style, a single rogue variable or a ‘black swan’ event can throw the most perfectly calibrated model into chaos."

"You are not thinking; you are merely being logical."

"Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense."

"The Uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating."

"Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people because their threats are so much more convincing."

"The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol."