Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

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

Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

A general "law of least effort" applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

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.

I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

Familiarity breeds liking.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.

A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.

Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.