Jonathan Berk
speaker
579 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 13 Aug
Jonathan Berk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
There's a landlord, an absentee landlord, who owns a building that has tenants in it.
And he compares two scenarios.
The one scenario is each time a tenant signs the lease, he says to the tenant,
Look, there is a filter on the heating system that needs to be replaced every month.
And if you don't replace it, you're going to lose heat and everybody is going to be in bad shape.
That's the one scenario.
The other scenario is he gets up at a meeting of all the tenants.
And in front of all the tenants, he announces, there is a filter on the heating system that has to be replaced once a month.
And if you don't, you're all going to lose heat.
And he asked the question, under which situation is it more likely that the filter will be replaced on time?
Whereas when it was private information, everybody knew the filter had to be replaced, but they did not know that everybody else knew that the filter had to be replaced.
So you're thinking to yourself, look, if there's some chance I'm the only one, I better replace that filter.
I don't want to be cold.
So that, I think, is a very good example of common knowledge and how important it is for human behavior.
Another example in the book of how understanding what common knowledge is affects human behavior is a case where you don't want there to be common knowledge.
So, for example, you get stopped by a police officer.
Now, one thing you could do is make a common knowledge.
You could say to the police officer, how much do I need to pay you to get me off this?
Right?
But that's not what we do.
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