Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

At the University of Bologna, there was another bizarre twist on what is the norm today: students fined their professors for unexcused absence or tardiness, or for not answering difficult questions.

the same mathematics that describes drawing pebbles from an urn can be employed to describe any series of trials in which each trial has two possible outcomes, as long as those outcomes are random and the trials are independent of each other.

regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

Obviously it can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. We cannot see a person's potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person.

in real-life situations we often make the opposite error: we assume that a sample or a series of trials is representative of the underlying situation when it is actually far too small to be reliable.

Do we, like the flight instructors, believe that harsh criticism improves our children's behavior or our employees' performance?

a bishop should not be condemned except with seventy-two witnesses… a cardinal priest should not be condemned except with forty-four witnesses, a cardinal deacon of the city of Rome without thirty-six witnesses, a subdeacon, acolyte, exorcist, lector, or doorkeeper except with seven witnesses.

Most of all it has taught me to appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.

Cardano worked at a time when mystical incantation was more valued than mathematical calculation.

The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy.

Jakob Bernoulli had shown that through mathematical analysis one could learn how the inner hidden probabilities that underlie natural systems are reflected in the data those systems produce.

you want to succeed, double your failure rate." I

In the end, though he learned how to run an observatory, he fell in love with a different pursuit, the idea of applying the mathematical tools of astronomy to social data.

A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear translated into about 1,000 more highway fatalities in that period than in the same period the year before—hidden casualties of the September 11 attack.24

We cannot know whether our single observation represents the mean or an outlier, an event to bet on or a rare happening that is not likely to be reproduced.

wine might be rated 91, but that number is meaningless if we have no estimate of the variation that would occur if the identical wine were rated again and again or by someone else.

few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received

Em vez de convencer as pessoas, os dados apenas polarizaram o grupo. Assim, até mesmo padrões aleatórios podem ser interpretados como evidências convincentes quando se relacionam a noções preconcebidas.

Conscious thought is a great aid in designing a car or deciphering the mathematical laws of nature, but for avoiding snake bites or cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the speed and efficiency of the unconscious can save you.

One trader even believed that relieving himself in the "wrong" toilet would bring bad fortune. Actually he was a bond trader who confessed his secret to a CNN reporter in 2003.

That brings us back to the default mode. "When your mind is at rest, what it is really doing is bouncing thoughts back and forth," Andreasen says. "Your association cortices are always running in the background, but when you are not focused on some task—for example, when you are doing something mindless, like driving—that's when your mind is most free to roam. That's why that is when you most actively create new ideas.

People think that their enjoyment of a product is based on the qualities of the product, but their experience of it is also very much based on the product's marketing

Let all the disciples of Aristotle…," he would write, "recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics."6

Our brains are not simply recording a taste or other experience, they are creating it.