Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

We already knew that people are good intuitive grammarians: at age four a child effortlessly conforms to the rules of grammar as she speaks, although she has no idea that such rules exist.

An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: "Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail." Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?

If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? 100 minutes OR 5 minutes

defining risk is thus an exercise in power.

Despite all the evidence in favor of mechanical and algorithmic prediction methods, and despite the rational calculus that clearly shows the value of incremental improvements in predictive accuracy, many decision makers will reject decision-making approaches that deprive them of the ability to exercise their intuition.

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. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.

what people acquire with a ticket is more than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning.

Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities. Here

There is essentially no evidence of situations in which people do very poorly and models do very well with the same information.

The halo effect discussed earlier contributes to coherence, because it inclines us to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgment of one attribute that is particularly significant. If

there is a large amount of objective ignorance in the prediction of human behavior.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.

for most people, the cause of a mistake matters. The

rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.

The Illusions of Pundits The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained

As you consider the next question, please assume that Steve was selected at random from a representative sample: An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: "Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail." Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?

The brief pleasure of a cool breeze on a hot day may make you slightly more positive and optimistic about whatever you are evaluating at that time.

The essential feature of this internal signal is that the sense of coherence is part of the experience of judgment. It is not contingent on a real outcome. As a result, the internal signal is just as available for nonverifiable judgments as it is for real, verifiable ones. This explains why making a judgment about a fictitious character like Gambardi feels very much the same as does making a judgment about the real world.

We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other.

The Affect Heuristic The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

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.

the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes

Happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does.

Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the same professional may be highly expert in some of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others.