Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.

our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. 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 only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health.

All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. In fact the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly.

Maintaining one's vigilance against biases is a chore—but the chance to avoid a costly mistake is sometimes worth the effort.

Our mind has a useful capability to focus spontaneously on whatever is odd, different, or unusual.

focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.

The first surprise is that people's guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which "knows" that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved.

frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels

Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck.

Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us.

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

Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives.

Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.

The classic experiment I describe next shows that people will not draw from base-rate information an inference that conflicts with other beliefs. It also supports the uncomfortable conclusion that teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.

Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

Words that you have seen before become easier to see again—you can identify them better than other words when they are shown very briefly or masked by noise, and you will be quicker (by a few hundredths of a second) to read them than to read other words. In short, you experience greater cognitive ease in perceiving a word you have seen earlier, and it is this sense of ease that gives you the impression of familiarity.

Causally, noise is nowhere; statistically, it is everywhere.

Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.

What you see is all there is