Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

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 Ã¢â'¬Â¦

We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort.

Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2.

we are statistically punished for being nice

The public is now well aware that formulas may do better than humans in some critical decisions in the world of sports:

In the words of one observer, "the reliance on the patient's subjective symptoms, the clinician's interpretation of the symptoms, and the absence of objective measure (such as a blood test) implant the seeds of diagnostic unreliability of psychiatric disorders." In this sense, psychiatry may prove especially resistant to attempts at noise reduction.

teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.

People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.

I never met Meehl, but he was one of my heroes from the time I read his Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence.

Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.

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.

luck plays a large role in every story of success;

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.

Prospect theory turned out to be the most significant work we ever did, and our article is among the most often cited in the social sciences.

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.

Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer.

Stanovich argues that high intelligence does not make people immune to biases. Another ability is involved, which he labels rationality. Stanovich's concept of a rational person is similar to what I earlier labeled "engaged." 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.

The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness.

System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.

During the first five years we spent looking at how people make decisions, we established a dozen facts about choices between risky options. Several of these facts were in flat contradiction to expected utility theory. Some had been observed before, a few were new. Then we constructed a theory that modified expected utility theory just enough to explain our collection of observations. That was prospect theory.

planning fallacy

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." Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to racing motorcycles—and for some fortunate authors I know, even writing a book is often an optimal experience.