700 Best Daniel Kahneman Quotes: Thinking, Fast And Slow
1. “We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.”
2. “Most of this book is about the workings of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.”
3. “System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”
4. “An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can’t easily recognize that they are the same.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
5. “Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.”
6. “There are some conditions where you have to trust your intuition.”
7. “That’s one of the real dangers of leader selection in many organizations: leaders are selected for overconfidence.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
8. “Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
9. “Not all frames are equal, and some frames are clearly better than alternative ways to describe (or to think about) the same thing. Consider the following pair of problems:
10. “His observation was astute and correct: occasions on which he praised a performance were likely to be followed by a disappointing performance, and punishments were typically followed by an improvement. But the inference he had drawn about the efficacy of reward and punishment was completely off the mark. What he had observed is known as regression to the mean, which in that case was due to random fluctuations in the quality of performance.”
11. “It is normally easy and actually quite pleasant to walk and think at the same time, but at the extremes these activities appear to compete for the limited resources of System 2. You can confirm this claim by a simple experiment. While walking comfortably with a friend, ask him to compute 23 × 78 in his head, and to do so immediately. He will almost certainly stop in his tracks.”
12. “Especially when the original critique is sharply worded, the reply and the rejoinder are often exercises in what I have called sarcasm for beginners and advanced sarcasm.”
13. “Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions.”
14. “Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.”
15. “correlation and regression are not two concepts—they are different perspectives on the same concept. The general rule is straightforward but has surprising consequences: whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean.”
16. “System 1 operates automatically and quickly with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.”
17. “This should not come as a surprise: overly optimistic forecasts of the outcome of projects are found everywhere. Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses.”
18. “recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.”
19. “Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
20. “A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”
21. “The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
22. “If a satisfactory answer to a hard question, isn’t found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that’s easier and will answer it.”
23. “The deeper truth is that there is nothing to explain.”
24. “A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing.”
25. “The only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.”
26. “We deeply want to be led by people who know what they’re doing and who don’t have to think about it too much.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
27. “the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment”
28. “During the intensive rocket bombing of London in World War II, it was generally believed that the bombing could not be random because a map of the hits revealed conspicuous gaps. Some suspected that German spies were located in the unharmed areas. A careful statistical analysis revealed that the distribution of hits was typical of a random process—and typical as well in evoking a strong impression that it was not random. “To the untrained eye,” Feller remarks, “randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.”
29. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.”
30. “A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs—an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.”
31. “What you see is all there is.”
32. “System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.”
33. “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.”
34. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
35. “If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”
36. “The spontaneous search for an intuitive solution sometimes fails—neither an expert solution nor a heuristic answer comes to mind. In such cases we often find ourselves switching to a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking. This is the slow thinking of the title. Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive”
37. “We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention.”
38. “If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.” ― Daniel Kahneman
39. “When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
40. “it is hard to agree with reality if you cannot agree with yourself.”
41. “…a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.”
42. “What if we could use many more predictors, gather much more data about each of them, spot relationship patterns that no human could detect, and model these patterns to achieve better prediction? This, in essence, is the promise of AI. ”
43. “The effects of high optimism on decision making are, at best, a mixed blessing, but the contribution of optimism to good implementation is certainly positive. The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks.”
44. “Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It’s highly fallible, and we should know that.”
45. “Most car buyers list gas mileage as one of the factors that determine their choice; they know that high-mileage cars have lower operating costs. But the frame that has traditionally been used in the US — miles per gallon — provides very poor guidance to the decisions of both individuals and policy makers. Consider 2 car owners who seek to reduce their costs:
46. “In another experiment in the series, participants were told that they would shortly have a get-acquainted conversation with another person and were asked to set up two chairs while the experimenter left to retrieve that person. Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers (118 vs. 80 centimeters). Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone.”
47. “When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.” ~ Daniel Kahneman Quotes
48. “The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved.”
49. “Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
50. “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” ― Daniel Kahneman
51. “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.”
52. “Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”
53. “Merely reminding people of a time when they had power increases their apparent trust in their own intuition.”
54. “Substituting one question for another can be a good strategy for solving difficult problems, and George Pólya included substitution in his classic How to Solve It: “If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.” Pólya’s heuristics are strategic procedures that are deliberately implemented by System 2. But the heuristics that I discuss in this chapter are not chosen; they are a consequence of the mental shotgun, the imprecise control we have over targeting our responses to questions.”
55. “Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the”
56. “The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”
57. “the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort”
58. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.” ― Daniel Kahneman
59. “One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.”
60. “Noise can be an invisible problem, even to people whose job is to see the invisible. ”
61. “How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?”
62. “This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
63. “It’s the consistency of info that matters for a great story, not its completeness. Indeed, you’ll often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
64. “Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.”
65. “Independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds. If people are not making their own judgments and are relying instead on what other people think, crowds might not be so wise after all. ”
66. “Asked whether they would rather eat an organic or a commercially grown apple, most people prefer the “all natural” one. Even after being informed that the two apples taste the same, have identical nutritional value, and are equally healthful, a majority still prefer the organic fruit. Even the producers of beer have found that they can increase sales by putting “All Natural” or “No Preservatives” on the label.”
67. “The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.”
68. “All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. In fact the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly.”
69. “When you say ‘quite clever,’ which reference group do you have in mind?”
70. “Characteristics of System 1:
71. “The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters. Even if they knew how little they know, the executives would be penalized for admitting it. President Truman famously asked for a “one-armed economist” who would take a clear stand; he was sick and tired of economists who kept saying, “On the other hand…”
72. “as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”
73. “The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.”
74. “The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.”
75. “people who make judgments behave as if a true value exists, regardless of whether it does.”
76. “el esfuerzo de la voluntad o autocontrol es fatigoso; si hemos de forzarnos a hacer algo, estamos menos dispuestos, o somos menos capaces, de ejercer el autocontrol si el próximo reto está cerca. El fenómeno se ha denominado agotamiento del ego.”
77. “Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
78. “The example also shows that it is costly to be risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses. These attitudes make you willing to pay a premium to obtain a sure gain rather than face a gamble, and also willing to pay a premium (in expected value) to avoid a sure loss.”
79. “Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.”
80. “The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory” ~ Daniel Kahneman
81. “They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case.”
82. “You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.” ― Daniel Kahneman
83. “People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses.”
84. “As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events.”
85. “The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.”
86. “As you can guess, this is a test of the readers’ vulnerability to stereotypes: do people rate the essay more favorably when it is attributed to a middle-aged man than they do when they believe that a young woman wrote it? They do, of course. But importantly, the difference is larger in the good-mood condition. People who are in a good mood are more likely to let their biases affect their thinking.”
87. “But we should not expect performance in officer training and in combat to be predictable from behavior on an obstacle field—behavior both on the test and in the real world is determined by many factors that are specific to the particular situation. Remove”
88. “Many concerns about algorithms are overblown, but some are legitimate. Algorithms may produce stupid mistakes that a human would never make, and therefore lose credibility even if they also succeed in preventing many errors that humans do make. They may be biased by poor design or by training on inadequate data. Their facelessness may inspire distrust. ”
89. “The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning. Statistical thinking derives conclusions about individual cases from properties of categories and ensembles. Unfortunately, System 1 does not have the capability for this mode of reasoning; System 2 can learn to think statistically, but few people receive the necessary training.”
90. “Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak.”
91. Placing too much trust in your beliefs
92. “Damasio and his colleagues have observed that people who do not display the appropriate emotions before they decide, sometimes because of brain damage, also have an impaired ability to make good decisions. An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.”
93. “There is good reason to believe that the administration of justice is infected by predictable incoherence in several domains. The evidence is drawn in part from experiments, including studies of mock juries, and in part from observation of patterns in legislation, regulation, and litigation.”
94. “She did not forget about the meeting. She was completely focused on something else when the meeting was set and she just didn’t hear you.”
95. “Ideas about politics and economics are a lot like movie stars. If people think that other people like them, such ideas can go far. ”
96. “You think with your body, not with your brain.”
97. “As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations—for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller. As you may have experienced when negotiating for the first time in a bazaar, the initial anchor has a powerful effect. My”
98. “...flow - a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle; interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations.”
99. “Judgments are both less noisy and less biased when those who make them are well trained, are more intelligent, and have the right cognitive style. In other words: good judgments depend on what you know, how well you think, and how you think. ”
100. “Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. But”
101. “Un modo sicuro di indurre la gente a credere a cose false è la frequente ripetizione, perché la familiarità non si distingue facilmente dalla verità.”
102. “The framing study yielded 3 main findings:
103. “Risk does not exist ‘out there,’ independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of ‘risk’ to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life.”
104. “The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory”
105. “Overconfidence is another manifestation of WYSIATI: when we estimate a quantity, we rely on information that comes to mind and construct a coherent story in which the estimate makes sense. Allowing for the information that does not come to mind—perhaps because one never knew it—is impossible.”
106. “You can see why the common admonition to “act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.”
107. “People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.”
108. “It is difficult to accept changes for the worse.”
109. “The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.”
110. “People are very sensitive to pressures and the immediate consequences they can have. The long-term effects are more abstract and hard to keep in mind. Global warming, for example. When the threat becomes concrete it will be too late to react.”
111. “System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious. Examples (in order of complexity) of things system 1 can do: determine that an object is at a greater distance than another, localize the source of a specific sound, complete the phrase “war and ...”, display disgust when seeing a gruesome image.”
112. “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
113. It’s hard to admit your own mistakes
114. “If the relative success of similar firms was determined entirely by factors that the CEO doesn’t control (call them luck, if you wish), you would find the more successful firm led by the weaker CEO 50% of the time. A correlation of .3 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs — an improvement of a mere 10% over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.
115. “The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
116. “Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct.”
117. “All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs drives into the blizzard, throwing good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.”
118. “Intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective info and disciplined scoring of separate traits.”
119. “The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.”
120. “you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”
121. “luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.”
122. “More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue.”
123. “Even the most enthusiastic proponents of AI agree that algorithms are not, and will not soon be, a universal substitute for human judgment. ”
124. “Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.... This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.”
125. “Charge the loss to your mental account of ‘general revenue’—you will feel better!”
126. “In areas that involve vague criteria and complex judgments, intrarater reliability, as it is called, can be poor.”
127. “Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.”
128. “Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences.”
129. “when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it,”
130. “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind.”
131. “You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”
132. “You are not always the same person, and you are less consistent over time than you think. But somewhat reassuringly, you are more similar to yourself yesterday than you are to another person today. ”
133. “In noisy systems, errors do not cancel out. They add up. ”
134. “Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
135. “Indeed, the average guess by people who were asked about Michigan is lower than the guesses of a similar group who were asked about the murder rate in Detroit. Blame for a failure to think of Detroit can be laid on both System 1 and System 2. Whether the city comes to mind when the state is mentioned depends in part on the automatic function of memory.”
136. “The observed regression to the mean cannot be more interesting or more explainable than the imperfect correlation.”
137. “All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.”
138. “The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one’s losses.”
139. “Este pequeño ejemplo ilustra una gran historia: los seres humanos esperan tener reacciones emocionales más intensas (el arrepentimiento incluido) frente a un resultado producido por una acción que frente al mismo resultado producido por la inacción.”
140. “Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information.”
141. “Words that you have seen before become easier to see again”
142. “We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.”
143. “You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. You are probably safe carrying on a conversation with a passenger while driving on an empty highway.”
144. “Everyone has some awareness of the limited capacity of attention, and our social behavior makes allowances for these limitations. When the driver of a car is overtaking a truck on a narrow road, for example, adult passengers quite sensibly stop talking. They know that distracting the driver is not a good idea, and they also suspect that he is temporarily deaf and will not hear what they say. Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention.”
145. “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.”
146. “We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.”
147. “These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster.”
148. “We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.” Heuristics and Biases
149. “reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
150. “People don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things.”
151. “You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
152. “I quoted Herbert Simon’s definition of intuition in the introduction, but it will make more sense when I repeat it now: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
153. “True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
154. “Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well…Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier. The odds are that you will be less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
155. “The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?).”
156. “It doesn’t take many observations to think you’ve spotted a trend, and it’s probably not a trend at all.”
157. “It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.”
158. “The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,”
159. “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
160. “Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions—and to an extreme reluctance to take risks.”
161. “When the driver of a car is overtaking a truck on a narrow road, for example, adult passengers quite sensibly stop talking.”
162. “We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.”
163. “In terms of noise, psychiatry is an extreme case.”
164. “The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”
165. “During a mental multiplication, the pupil normally dilated to a large size within a few seconds and stayed large as long as the individual kept working on the problem; it contracted immediately when she found a solution or gave up.”
166. “The objective of policy should be to reduce human suffering. We aim for a lower U-index in society. Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority.” “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” “Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.”
167. “System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy.”
168. “The evidence is unequivocal, there’s a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
169. “To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.”
170. “The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions.”
171. “Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive thought—the expert and the heuristic”
172. “The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.”
173. “Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.”
174. “Perhaps his second interview was less impressive than the first because he was afraid of disappointing us, but more likely it was his first that was unusually good.”
175. “As surely and quickly as you saw that the young woman’s hair is dark, you knew she is angry. Furthermore, what you saw extended into the future. You sensed that this woman is about to say some very unkind words, probably in a loud and strident voice.”
176. “It is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
177. “Schwarz and his colleagues observed that the task of listing instances may enhance the judgments of the trait by two different routes
178. “A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
179. “Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
180. “The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
181. “What AI does involves no magic and no understanding; it is mere pattern finding. ”
182. “Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
183. “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task. Claims”
184. “Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. The analogy goes deep. Your use of electricity depends on what you choose to do, whether to light a room or toast a piece of bread. When you turn on a bulb or a toaster, it draws the energy it needs but no more. Similarly, we decide what to do, but we have limited control over the effort of doing it.”
185. “Nick Epley and Tom Gilovich found evidence that adjustment is a deliberate attempt to find reasons to move away from the anchor:”
186. “The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding our world.”
187. “Wherever there is judgment, there is noise – and more of it than you think. ”
188. “The experiments showed further that the mean filial regression towards mediocrity was directly proportional to the parental deviation from it.”
189. “optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One”
190. “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” ― Daniel Kahneman
191. “Formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they aren’t affected by accidents of sampling.
192. “We’re generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.”
193. “The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval.”
194. “training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months.”
195. “Richer and more realistic assumptions do not suffice to make a theory successful. Scientists”
196. “This set of choices has a lot to tell us about the limits of human rationality. For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage.”
197. “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.”
198. “People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
199. “A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”
200. “A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.”
201. “Another illustration of the role of fatigue among clinicians is the lower rate of appropriate handwashing during the end of hospital shifts. (Handwashing turns out to be noisy, too.)”
202. “The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
203. “your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.”
204. “students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.”
205. “Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.”
206. “The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
207. “We can be blind to the obvious, and also blind to our blindness.”
208. “System noise is inconsistency, and inconsistency damages the credibility of the system. ”
209. “The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient motivation, not trying hard enough.”
210. “Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts”
211. “Why call them System 1 and System 2 rather than the more descriptive “automatic system” and “effortful system”? The reason is simple: “Automatic system” takes longer to say than “System 1” and therefore takes more space in your working memory. This matters, because anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.”
212. “The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog”
213. “By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.”
214. “If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That’s the ‘halo effect.'”
215. “When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.”
216. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
217. “Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!”
218. “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”
219. “controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.”
220. “The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.”
221. “If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.”
222. “the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics.”
223. “More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive—incorrect—answer.”
224. “In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions—an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System 2.”
225. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”
226. “The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.”
227. “Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”
228. “Every night for the next week, set aside 10 minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well. Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier. The odds are that you will be less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now.”
229. “it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”
230. “A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. The hope”
231. “puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We”
232. “Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.”
233. “In the absence of valid cues, intuitive “hits” are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
234. “You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it.”
235. “It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
236. “More intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things.”
237. “Bias and noise—systematic deviation and random scatter—are different components of error.”
238. “I found in the collaboration was that Amos frequently saw the point of my vague ideas much more clearly than I did.”
239. “The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence. In his view, superficial or ‘lazy’ thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a failure of rationality.”
240. “It’s nonsense to say money doesn’t buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.”
241. “bazaar shoppers who wear dark glasses in order to hide their level of interest from merchants.”
242. “Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck.”
243. “I tend to view the occasional failures of algorithms as opportunities to improve them. On the other hand, I find more pleasure than Klein does in the come-uppance of arrogant experts who claim intuitive powers in zero-validity situations.”
244. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”
245. “Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.”
246. “premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”
247. “Our screening procedure is good but not perfect, so we should anticipate regression. We shouldn’t be surprised that the very best candidates often fail to meet our expectations.”
248. “Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
249. “You are not the same person at all times. As your mood varies, some features of your cognitive machinery vary with it. If you are shown a complex judgment problem, your mood in the moment may influence your approach to the problem and the conclusions you reach, even when you believe that your mood has no such influence and even when you can confidently justify the answer you found. In short, you are noisy. ”
250. “Earlier I traced people’s confidence in a belief to two related impressions: cognitive ease and coherence. We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true.”
251. “Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”
252. “Experts don’t know exactly where the boundaries of their expertise are.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
253. “Judgment is not a synonym for thinking, and making accurate judgments is not a synonym for having good judgment.”
254. “Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”
255. “there are many pseudo-experts who have no idea that they do not know what they are doing (the illusion of validity), and that as a general proposition subjective confidence is commonly too high and often uninformative.”
256. “People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with digits or because they are slightly drunk.”
257. “Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.” ~ Daniel Kahneman Quotes
258. “The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. If you like the current health policy, you believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than the costs of alternatives.”
259. “an organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. Every factory must have ways to ensure the quality of its products in the initial design, in fabrication, and in final inspections. The corresponding stages in the production of decisions are the framing of the problem that is to be solved, the collection of relevant information leading to a decision, and reflection and review. An organization that seeks to improve its decision product should routinely look for efficiency improvements at each of these stages. The”
260. “Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.”
261. “Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.”
262. “My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision-making—from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.”
263. “Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.”
264. “We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.”
265. “The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn’t terribly large.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
266. “The experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of ‘pastness’ that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience’. This quality of pastness is an illusion.”
267. “The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role.”
268. “Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
269. “Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.”
270. “The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.”
271. “many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions”
272. “SPEAKING OF SYSTEM 1 AND SYSTEM 2 “He had an impression, but some of his impressions are illusions.” “This was a pure System 1 response. She reacted to the threat before she recognized it.” “This is your System 1 talking. Slow down and let your System 2 take control.”
273. “Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.”
274. “individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help.”
275. “We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”
276. “When experts and the public disagree on their priorities, he says, “Each side must respect the insights and intelligence of the other.”
277. “We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers”
278. “However, the magic of error reduction works well only when the observations are independent and their errors uncorrelated. If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.”
279. “his pupils widening as he watched beautiful nature pictures, and it ends with two striking pictures of the same good-looking woman, who somehow appears much more attractive in one than in the other. There is only one difference: the pupils of the eyes appear dilated in the attractive picture and constricted in the other.”
280. “What you learned about the Müller-Lyer illusion did not change the way you see the lines, but it changed your behavior. You now know that you cannot trust your impression of the length of lines that have fins appended to them, and you also know that in the standard Müller-Lyer display you cannot trust what you see. When asked about the length of the lines, you will report your informed belief, not the illusion that you continue to see.”
281. “a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.”
282. “We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.”
283. “We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
284. “La inteligencia no es solo la capacidad de razonar; es también la capacidad de encontrar material relevante en la memoria y enfocar la atención cuando se necesita.”
285. “If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
286. “the line between what clinicians can do well and what they cannot do at all well is not obvious, and certainly not obvious to them.”
287. “regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause.”
288. “We tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently than we see it ourselves by declaring that these others, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral defect, are unable to see things “as they really are” and to react to them “in a normal way.” We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact as we see them, and that our ways are the normal ways.” Heuristics and Biases
289. “The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.
290. “Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?”
291. “A aquisição de habilidades exige um ambiente regular, uma oportunidade adequada para praticar e um feedback rápido e inequívoco sobre a precisão dos pensamentos e ações.”
292. “The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.”
293. “A general ‘law of least effort’ applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of
294. “To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases…they immediately made the generalization…
295. “You just like winning and dislike losing—and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning.”
296. “Bernoulli’s model lacks the idea of a reference point, expected utility theory does not represent the obvious fact that the outcome that is good for Anthony is bad for Betty. His model could explain Anthony’s risk aversion, but it cannot explain Betty’s risk-seeking preference for the gamble, a behavior that is often observed in entrepreneurs and in generals when all their options are bad.”
297. “Companies with pronounceable names do better than others for the first week after the stock is issued,”
298. “Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.”
299. “Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses. The list of horror stories is endless.”
300. “the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment.”
301. “Before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.” ― Daniel Kahneman
302. “For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic
303. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. But”
304. “Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. ”
305. “the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment. This procedure makes better use of the knowledge available to members of the group than the common practice of open discussion.”
306. “Confirmation bias can lead you to form an overall impression too early and to ignore contradictory information. The titles of two Hitchcock movies sum it up: a good decision maker should aim to keep a “shadow of a doubt,” not to be “the man who knew too much. ”
307. “The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions.”
308. “Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsigh”
309. “You have been invited to think of the two systems as agents within the mind, with their individual personalities, abilities, and limitations. I will often use sentences in which the systems are the subjects.”
310. “Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it.”
311. “acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.” ― Daniel Kahneman,
312. “Among doctors, the level of noise is far higher than we might have suspected. In diagnosing cancer and heart disease – even in reading X-rays – specialists sometimes disagree. That means that the treatment a patient gets might be a product of a lottery. ”
313. “The errors of a theory are rarely found in what it asserts explicitly; they hide in what it ignores or tacitly assumes.”
314. “A general “law of least effort†applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”
315. “Asserting that the future is unpredictable is hardly a conceptual breakthrough. However, the obviousness of this fact is matched only by the regularity with which it is ignored. ”
316. “It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.”
317. “One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions “suggested” by System 1,”
318. “The goal of venture capitalists is to call the extreme cases correctly, even at the cost of overestimating the prospects of many other ventures.”
319. “SPEAKING OF ATTENTION AND EFFORT “I won’t try to solve this while driving. This is a pupil-dilating task. It requires mental effort!” “The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.” “She did not forget about the meeting. She was completely focused on something else when the meeting was set and she just didn’t hear you.” “What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I’ll have to start over and search my memory deliberately.”
320. “Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.” ― Daniel Kahneman
321. “Risk” does not exist “out there,” independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as “real risk” or “objective risk.”
322. “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
323. “Aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they didn’t.
324. “overconfidence is a direct consequence of features of System 1 that can be tamed—but not vanquished. The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it.”
325. “O fato central de nossa existência é que o tempo é o recurso finito supremo, mas o eu recordativo ignora essa realidade.”
326. “The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
327. “Burton Malkiel’s wonderful book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.”
328. “If algorithms make fewer mistakes than human experts do and yet we have an intuitive preference for people, then our intuitive preferences should be carefully examined. ”
329. “The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics”
330. “A los que evitan el pecado de la pereza intelectual podríamos llamarlos «diligentes». Están más alerta, son intelectualmente más activos, están menos dispuestos a quedarse satisfechos con respuestas superficialmente sugerentes, y son más escépticos con sus intuiciones.”
331. “She is a hedgehog. She has a theory that explains everything, and it gives her the illusion that she understands the world.”
332. “A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.”
333. “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.”
334. “The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
335. “The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy. In the real world, of course, we often face painful tradeoffs between benefits and costs.”
336. “However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.”
337. “When physicians are under time pressure, they are apparently more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution, despite its serious downsides.”
338. It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient. - Daniel Kahneman
339. “The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”
340. “People tend to assess the relative importance of
341. “From the perspective of noise reduction, a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once. Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. And practices that reduce error should be just as effective in your one-of-a-kind decisions as in your repeated ones.”
342. “living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about”
343. “couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”
344. “Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
345. “the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.”
346. “If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgments that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence”
347. “Many unfortunate human situations unfold [. . .] where people who face bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief is too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one's losses.”
348. “In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume reduced the principles of association to three: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. Our concept of association has changed radically since Hume’s days, but his three principles still provide a good start.”
349. “Experimental economist John List, who’s studied trading at baseball card conventions, found that novice traders were reluctant to part with the cards they owned, but that this reluctance eventually disappeared with trading experience. More surprisingly, List found a large effect of trading experience on the endowment effect for new goods.
350. “If you like the president’s politics, you probably like his voice and appearance as well. The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person — including things you haven’t observed — is known as the halo effect, a good name for the common bias that plays a large role in shaping our view of people and situations.”
351. “If the correlation between the intelligence of spouses is less than perfect (and if men and women on average don’t differ in intelligence), then it’s a mathematical inevitability that highly intelligent women will be married to husbands who are on average less intelligent than they are (and vice versa, of course). The observed regression to the mean cannot be more interesting or more explainable than the imperfect correlation.”
352. “We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.””We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” ― Daniel Kahneman
353. “Losses evoke stronger negative feelings than costs. Choices are not reality-bound because System 1 is not reality-bound.
354. “A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome. Our story was no exception.”
355. “One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.”
356. “all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy.”
357. “For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering”
358. “If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.”
359. “a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.”
360. “We’re not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion – they believe they always thought that.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
361. “Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.”
362. “intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
363. “Starting from a completely unexpected event, your System 1 made as much sense as possible of the situation—two simple words, oddly juxtaposed—by linking the words in a causal story; it evaluated the possible threat (mild to moderate) and created a context for future developments by preparing you for events that had just become more likely; it also created a context for the current event by evaluating how surprising it was. You ended up as informed about the past and as prepared for the future as you could be.”
364. “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”)”
365. “The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it.”
366. “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”
367. “Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions” ~ Daniel Kahneman
368. “Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
369. “An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.”
370. “Averaging two guesses by the same person does not improve judgments as much as does seeking out an independent second opinion. As Vul and Pashler put it, “You can gain about 1/10th as much from asking yourself the same question twice as you can from getting a second opinion from someone else.” This is not a large improvement. But you can make the effect much larger by waiting to make a second guess.”
371. “Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. Memory function is an attribute of System 1. However, everyone has the option of slowing down to conduct an active search of memory for all possibly relevant facts—just as they could slow down to check the intuitive answer in the bat-and-ball problem. The extent of deliberate checking and search is a characteristic of System 2, which varies among individuals.”
372. “Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
373. “The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position.”
374. “Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.” ― Daniel Kahneman
375. “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.”
376. “you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”
377. “Casting about for a useful topic of research, I found and article in Scientific American in which the psychologist Eckhard Hess described the pupil of the eye as a window to the soul.”
378. “The halo effect and outcome bias combine to explain the extraordinary appeal of books that seek to draw operational morals from systematic examination of successful businesses.”
379. “The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us.”
380. “Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths.”
381. “It’s easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
382. “The physician who prescribes the unusual treatment faces a substantial risk of regret, blame, and perhaps litigation. In hindsight, it will be easier to imagine the normal choice; the abnormal choice will be easy to undo. True, a good outcome will contribute to the reputation of the physician who dared, but the potential benefit is smaller than the potential cost because success is generally a more normal outcome than failure.”
383. “people form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings and their basic tendency to approach or avoid, often without knowing that they are doing so. The”
384. “Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health.”
385. “...the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.”
386. “The premortem is not a panacea and does not provide complete protection against nasty surprises, but it goes some way toward reducing the damage of plans that are subject to the biases of WYSIATI and uncritical optimism.”
387. “message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability.”
388. “In an article titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”
389. “Beatty e eu trabalhamos juntos durante apenas um ano, mas nossa colaboração teve grande efeito em nossas carreiras subsequentes.”
390. “The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.”
391. “In normal circumstances, however, we draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it. To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.”
392. “Success equals talent plus luck; great success equals a little more talent plus a lot of luck.”
393. “I decided to evaluate my portfolio only once a quarter. I am too loss averse to make sensible decisions in the face of daily price fluctuations.”
394. “A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome. Our”
395. “If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
396. “Some noise may be inevitable in practice, a necessary side effect of a system of due process that gives each case individualized consideration, that does not treat people like cogs in a machine, and that grants decision makers a sense of agency. ”
397. “Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.”
398. “My experience is that I can think while strolling but cannot engage in mental work that imposes a heavy load on short-term memory.”
399. “If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That’s the ‘halo effect.’ Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs.”
400. “If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”
401. “A divorce is like a symphony with a screeching sound at the end—the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad.” (Thinking, Fast and Slow Quotes)
402. “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.” The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.”
403. “The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable. The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).”
404. “When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word: it’s happiness. People do not distinguish.”
405. “Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.”
406. “People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
407. “We find that firms with award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, in terms both of stock and of operating performance. At the same time, CEO compensation increases, CEOs spend more time on activities outside the company such as writing books and sitting on outside boards, and they are more likely to engage in earnings management.”
408. “A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. Here again, as in the mere exposure effect, the connection makes biological sense. A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required.”
409. “An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.”
410. “Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.”
411. “Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort.”
412. “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
413. “People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.”
414. “Familiarity breeds liking.” ― Daniel Kahneman
415. “If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
416. “Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”
417. “There is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”
418. “The lesson of figure 5 is that predictable illusions inevitably occur if a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive ease or strain. Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
419. “the pupil of the eye as a window to the soul.”
420. “If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.”
421. “In several experiments, people were able to resist the effects of ego depletion when given a strong incentive to do so. In contrast, increasing effort is not an option when you must keep six digits in short-term memory while performing a task. Ego depletion”
422. “It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence. Psychology has come a long way.”
423. “The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of the knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”
424. “In any judgment, some information is relevant, and some is not. More information is not always better, especially if it has the potential to bias judgments by leading the judge to form a premature intuition. ”
425. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it” — Daniel Kahneman
426. “Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels”
427. “The shape of the response was an inverted V. As you experienced it if you tried Add-1 or Add-3, effort builds up with every added digit that you hear, reaches an almost intolerable peak as you rush to produce a transformed string during and immediately after the pause, and relaxes gradually as you “unload” your short-term memory.”
428. “She says experience has taught her that criticism is more effective than praise. What she doesn’t understand is that it’s all due to regression to the mean.”
429. “Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved—whether by their superiors or by a client—supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In”
430. “Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.”
431. “declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
432. “There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.”
433. “I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort—no more than retaining two or three digits.”
434. “The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant.”
435. “Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
436. “Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept other suggestions from System 1. In particular, they are impulsive, impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification.”
437. “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
438. “Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.”
439. “The statement “Hitler loved dogs and little children” is shocking no matter how many times you hear it, because any trace of kindness in someone so evil violates the expectations set up by the halo effect.”
440. “The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words happened by a process called associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. The”
441. “The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.”
442. “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.”
443. “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.”
444. “Intuitive predictions need to be corrected because they are not regressive and therefore are biased.”
445. “For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads.”
446. “Psychologists commonly chose samples so small that they exposed themselves to a 50% risk of failing to confirm their true hypotheses! No researcher in their right mind would accept such a risk. A plausible explanation was that psychologists’ decisions about sample size reflected prevalent intuitive misconceptions of the extent of sampling variation.
447. “The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.” ― Daniel Kahneman
448. “Most of the moments of our life – and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 – most of them don’t leave a trace.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
449. “As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.”
450. “If you wish to experience your System 2 working at full tilt, the following exercise will do; it should bring you to the limits of your cognitive abilities within 5 seconds. To start, make up several strings of 4 digits, all different, and write each string on an index card.”
451. “suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts.”
452. “thought—the expert and the heuristic—as well as the entirely automatic mental activities of perception and memory, the operations that enable you to know there is a lamp on your desk or retrieve the name of the capital of Russia.”
453. “A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
454. “Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” ― Daniel Kahneman
455. “In a perfect world, defendants would face justice; in our world, they face a noisy system. ”
456. “Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from 50+ years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than playing poker. Typically at least 2 out of every 3 mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.
457. “When a mysterious series of ads in student newspapers ended, investigators sent questionnaires to the university communities, asking for impressions of whether each of the words ‘means something ‘good’ or something ‘bad.’’ The results were spectacular: the words that were presented more frequently were rated much more favorably than the words that had been shown only once or twice. This finding has been confirmed in many experiments, using Chinese ideographs, faces, or randomly-shaped polygons.
458. “We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.”
459. “How closely does System 2 monitor the suggestions of System 1? His reasoning was that we know a significant fact about anyone who says that the ball costs 10¢: that person did not actively check whether the answer was correct, and her System 2 endorsed an intuitive answer that it could have rejected with a small investment of effort.”
460. “Add-1 with four digits caused a larger dilation than the task of holding seven digits for immediate recall. Add-3, which is much more difficult,”
461. “It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costles is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is no scientifically defensible.”
462. “the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.”
463. “The combination of probability neglect with the social mechanisms of availability cascades inevitably leads to gross exaggeration of minor threats, sometimes with important consequences.”
464. There are no limits to our blindness
465. “Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.”
466. “The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
467. “You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the”
468. “Widespread fears, even if they are unreasonable, should not be ignored by policy makers. Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.”
469. The mind makes everything worse
470. “Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
471. “Lo mejor que podemos hacer es llegar a un compromiso: aprender a reconocer situaciones en las que los errores sean probables y esforzarnos en evitar errores importantes cuando están en juego cosas de primer orden. La premisa de este libro es que es más fácil reconocer los errores de otros que los nuestros.”
472. “Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.”
473. “Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as “real risk” or “objective risk.”
474. “I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.” ― Daniel Kahneman
475. “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.” ― Daniel Kahneman
476. “Learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.”
477. “As predicted by denominator neglect, low-probability events are much more heavily weighted when described in terms of relative frequencies (how many) than when stated in more abstract terms of ‘chances,’ ‘risk,’ or ‘probability’ (how likely). As we’ve seen, System 1 is much better with dealing with individuals than categories.
478. “Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In”
479. “Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise.”
480. “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.”
481. “probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.”
482. “First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.”
483. “People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
484. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.”
485. “Noise is mostly a by-product of our uniqueness, of our “judgment personality.”
486. “The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.” ― Daniel Kahneman
487. “How many murders occur in the state of Michigan in one year? The question, which was also devised by Shane Frederick, is again a challenge to System 2. The “trick” is whether the respondent will remember that Detroit, a high-crime city, is in Michigan.”
488. “We spend a lot of time on our performance ratings, and yet the results are one-quarter performance and three-quarters system noise. ”
489. “The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.”
490. “We think we understand what is going on here, but could we have predicted it? ”
491. “Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.”
492. “SPEAKING OF CONTROL “She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in a state of flow.” “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.” “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.”
493. “focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
494. “Of course, we and our animal cousins are quickly alerted to signs of opportunities to mate or to feed, and advertisers design billboards accordingly.”
495. “Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.”
496. “The idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.” ― Daniel Kahneman
497. “answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”