Quotes from Michael Lewis

Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.

She said working for the government, you need to imagine you are tied down, Gulliver-style. And if you want to even wiggle your big toe, first you need to ask permission. And that if you can imagine that and still imagine getting things done, you'll get things done.

When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.

Each of the crude strategies had some slight effect, but none by itself made much of a dent, and certainly none had the ability to halt the pandemic by driving the disease's reproductive rate below 1. One intervention was not like the others, however: when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff.

Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment." The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean

He'd now awakened to the possibility that at least one of his mental models badly distorted reality: his model of American government.

Healtheon was worth whatever investors felt like paying for it, and that depended largely on public opinion. Healtheon was running for president. The IPO was election day.

Astrodome's fences were moved in. Would the team, as currently composed, do better or worse in a smaller, more hitter-friendly park? Cramer ran the numbers—showing the relative propensity of the Astros versus their opponents to hit long pop flies—and told Rosen, "Sorry, if

When you fed into those models the question "What happens if you do nothing but close schools and reduce the social interaction of minors by 60 percent?," they responded, slowly, but as one: that works.

BILLY WOULD SAY later that his wife left him because she was unnerved by his intensity—that she could even see it in his hands when he drove an automobile.

In making predictions and judgments under uncertainty," they wrote, "people do not appear to follow the calculus of chance or the statistical theory of prediction. Instead, they rely on a limited number of heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead to severe and systematic error.

The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire.

All the way back to the founding of the country. Early-stage innovation in most industries would not have been possible without government support in a variety of ways, and it's especially true in energy. So the notion that we are just going to privatize early-stage innovation is ridiculous. Other countries are outspending us in R&D, and we are going to pay a price.

A programmer brought in from the outside to fix a bug in the code needed to determine quickly how it worked. With Lance's code this was impossible. When

I'm now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone, without breaking the law, is to call someone he doesn't know and try to sell that person something he doesn't want.

Communicable meant a person could give it to another person. You could get Lyme disease, for instance, but you couldn't give it to somebody else. Communicable diseases were the diseases that created crises.

Everyone could see that kids played a role in disease transmission. No one imagined they would have the effect that they had in the Glasses' model.

A loss, according to the theory, was when a person wound up worse off than his "reference point." But what was this reference point? The easy answer was: wherever you started from.

The passage of time allowed for him and everyone else to see that the blame that had been assigned to an individual was more fairly bestowed on a situation.

The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds," Danny wrote. "We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.

No single intervention would stop a flu-like disease in its tracks, just as no single safety measure would prevent a doctor from replacing the right hip when it was the left hip that hurt. The trick was to mix and match strategies in response to the nature of the disease and the behavior of the population. Each strategy was like another slice of Swiss cheese; enough slices, properly aligned, would hide the holes.

If anything like the 1918 flu occurred, the basic functions of the society would come to a halt, and no one in the federal government seemed to have worried about it.

The two other states that moved most quickly to shut down, Ohio and Maryland, had also paid close attention to Carter's analysis.

He learned that there were more than one hundred thousand K–12 schools in the country, with fifty million children in them. Twenty-five million rode a bus to school. "I thought, Holy crap, half the kids in the U.S. hop on a school bus." There were seventy thousand buses in the entire U.S. public transportation system, but five hundred thousand school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire U.S. public transportation system.