Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. 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.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. 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

Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.... This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.

the prediction of the future is not distinguished from an evaluation of current evidence—prediction matches evaluation. This is perhaps the best evidence we have for the role of substitution.

Flow neatly separates the two forms of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention.

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct.

Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

O fato central de nossa existência é que o tempo é o recurso finito supremo, mas o eu recordativo ignora essa realidade.

In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions—an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System 2.

Lo mejor que podemos hacer es llegar a un compromiso: aprender a reconocer situaciones en las que los errores sean probables y esforzarnos en evitar errores importantes cuando están en juego cosas de primer orden. La premisa de este libro es que es más fácil reconocer los errores de otros que los nuestros.

The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice.

I tend to view the occasional failures of algorithms as opportunities to improve them. On the other hand, I find more pleasure than Klein does in the come-uppance of arrogant experts who claim intuitive powers in zero-validity situations.

flow - a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle; interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations.

The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable. The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

Another illustration of the role of fatigue among clinicians is the lower rate of appropriate handwashing during the end of hospital shifts. (Handwashing turns out to be noisy, too.)

System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy.

From the perspective of noise reduction, a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once. Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. And practices that reduce error should be just as effective in your one-of-a-kind decisions as in your repeated ones.

In areas that involve vague criteria and complex judgments, intrarater reliability, as it is called, can be poor.

Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative. These conclusions were well established for choices about gambles and sure things in the domain of money.

A aquisição de habilidades exige um ambiente regular, uma oportunidade adequada para praticar e um feedback rápido e inequívoco sobre a precisão dos pensamentos e ações.

Remarkably, altruistic punishment is accompanied by increased activity in the "pleasure centers" of the brain. It appears that maintaining the social order and the rules of fairness in this fashion is its own reward. Altruistic punishment could well be the glue that holds societies together. However, our brains are not designed to reward generosity as reliably as they punish meanness. Here again, we find a marked asymmetry between losses and gains.

Richer and more realistic assumptions do not suffice to make a theory successful. Scientists

But we should not expect performance in officer training and in combat to be predictable from behavior on an obstacle field—behavior both on the test and in the real world is determined by many factors that are specific to the particular situation. Remove

people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task.