Daniel Kahneman Quotes
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.
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
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.
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.
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.
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
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.
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.
Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.
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.
Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.
Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.
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.
When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.
If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.
Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.
In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.
It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.
People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.
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.
I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.
We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.
The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large.
When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
A plan is only a scenario, and almost by definition, it is optimistic... As a result, scenario planning can lead to a serious underestimate of the risk of failure.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
Establish a closing ritual. Know when to stop working. Try to end each work day the same way, too. Straighten up your desk. Back up your computer. Make a list of what you need to do tomorrow.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
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.
Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.
People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.
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.
We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
