Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

We had progressed from "completely useless" to "moderately useful.

Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing the assessment than on the performance being assessed.

Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better

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.

The tasks that we studied varied considerably in their effects on the pupil. At baseline, our subjects were awake, aware, and ready to engage in a task—probably at a higher level of arousal and cognitive readiness than usual.

Let's not fall for the outcome bias. This was a stupid decision even though it worked out well.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior

A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as "I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.

But this was the army. Useful or not, there was a routine to be followed and orders to be obeyed.

Time pressure is another driver of effort. As you carried out the Add-3 exercise, the rush was imposed in part by the metronome and in part by the load on memory. Like a juggler with several balls in the air, you cannot afford to slow down; the rate at which material decays in memory forces the pace, driving you to refresh and rehearse information before it is lost. Any task that requires you to keep several ideas in mind at the same time has the same hurried character.

Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.

we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability

When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.

most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

People voted for someone who looked strong and decisive without any other reason to believe that he was.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They

We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign—like the fins on the parallel lines. It is an illusion—a cognitive illusion—and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it. The question that is most often asked

The essence of the focusing illusion is WYSIATI, giving too much weight to the climate, too little to all the other determinants of well-being.

We must allow for that uncertainty in our thinking.

A matter of judgment is one with some uncertainty about the answer and where we allow for the possibility that reasonable and competent people might disagree.

In everyday speech, we call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and their values. The

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.