Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

neither of us ever rejected out of hand anything the other said.

the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.

The essential keys to disciplined Bayesian reasoning can be simply summarized: Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence.

Level noise is variability in the average level of judgments by different judges. Pattern noise is variability in judges' responses to particular cases.

Differences between experts and the public are explained in part by biases in lay judgments, but Slovic draws attention to situations in which the differences reflect a genuine conflict of values.

Life, however, is usually a between-subjects experiment

In short, doctors are significantly more likely to order cancer screenings early in the morning than late in the afternoon.

Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly

Wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.

Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory.

people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.

watercooler conversations that intelligently explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty.

judgment heuristics "are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors.

Klein and I eventually agreed on an important principle: the confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity.

The stories understandably frightened the public, and those fears encouraged more media coverage, the basic mechanism of an availability cascade.

You may have noticed that the decomposition of system noise into level noise and pattern noise follows the same logic as the error equation in the previous chapter, which decomposed error into bias and noise. This time, the equation can be written as follows: System Noise2 = Level Noise2 + Pattern Noise2

People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so.

you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.

The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment.

beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

It follows that patients with appointment times later in the day were less likely to receive guideline-recommended cancer screening.

In particular, the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics. We can now draw a richer and more balanced picture, in which skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices.

Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people.