Quotes from Michael Lewis

Paul Meehl's book, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, about the inability of psychologists to outperform algorithms when trying to diagnose, or predict the behavior of, their patients. It was the same book Danny Kahneman had read in the mid-1950s before he replaced the human judges of new Israeli soldiers with a crude algorithm.

Six and a half hours later, the market closed. Zoran had no idea whether the market as a whole had finished up or down for the day. Ten minutes after that he could be found, alone, pacing outside the 9/11 memorial, smoking a cigarette. "This is like the first day of the battle against complacency," he said.

The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make

Engineers created the wealth. And during the 1990s Silicon Valley had created a fantastic amount of new wealth.

But what is your religion?" "I don't have one." "But you believe in God?" "No." He thinks this over. "Then I'm pretty sure they can't let you in.

An afternoon can fly by or it can take 5 hours. Like you probably do, I productively fill the gaps that most people leave as dead time. My drive to be productive probably cost me my first marriage and a few days ago almost cost me my fiancée. Before I went to college the military had this "we do more before 9am than most people do all day" and I used to think and I do more than the military.

Most physicians try to maintain this facade of being rational and scientific and logical and it's a great lie," said Redelmeier. "A partial lie. What leads us is hopes and dreams and emotion.

We are the only reason your shitty state is standing.

A banking system is an act of faith: It survives only for as long as people believe it will.

people Trump had sent into the Department of Agriculture were white men in their twenties.

If the highly paid, publicly scrutinized employees of a business that had existed since the 1860s could be misunderstood by their market, who couldn't be? If the market for baseball players was inefficient, what market couldn't be? If a fresh analytical approach had led to the discovery of new knowledge in baseball, was there any sphere of human activity in which it might not do the same?

John Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.

all the other Giants players were X's or O's. Lawrence was the only one who had a number: fifty-six. He was a little

Once he had identified the new new thing, all he needed was some really smart, passionate engineers to chase after it and make it happen.

There was a vividly clear class distinction between tech guys and finance guys. The finance guys saw the tech guys as faceless help and were unable to think of them as anything else.

I reached the conclusion that there was no God. That was the end of my religious life.

the federal government provided services that the private sector couldn't or wouldn't: medical care for veterans, air traffic control, national highways, food safety guidelines.

With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try. This was perhaps one way time heals wounds, by making them feel less avoidable.

If that involved some misperception on Amos's part—some exaggeration of the earthly status of Danny's ideas—well, then, Amos should continue to misperceive. After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one's perception of another, in relation to everyone else? "I wanted something from him, not from the world," said Danny.

After seeing the diabolically clever data-based approach taken by the North Carolina legislature in writing laws to make it more difficult for African Americans to vote, the comedian John Oliver congratulated the legislators for having "Money-balled racism.

There was the CDC way of doing things," she said. "It was vaccinate and isolate. And this wasn't that.

nothing short of the U.S. government could save them.

East Germans are the Greeks of Germany," I say. "Be careful," she says.

All the risks are science-based," said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. "You can't gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.