Quotes from Michael Lewis

If our minds can be misled by our false stereotype of something as measurable as randomness, how much might they be misled by other, vaguer stereotypes?

What is it with you freedom-loving Americans? he asked. Live free or die. I don't get it. I say, "Regulate me gently. I'd rather live.

The mind was more like a coping mechanism than it was a perfectly designed tool. "The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can," he once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. "It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation.

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland's disaster, and Wall Street's, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risk-taking jobs.

You're going to make a mistake,' " said Carter. "The sin is making the same mistake twice. The best is to learn from other people's mistakes.

Redelmeier was newly struck by the inability of human beings to judge risks, even when their misjudgment might kill them.

Trump's budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant. Donald Trump didn't invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.

But Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team.

The accounting rules allowed them to assume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This assumption became the engine of their doom.

the utilitarians. They were interested only in the computer's crude and brutish ability to impose its will on the world around it.

My interest in psychology was as a way to do philosophy," he said. "To understand the world by understanding why people, especially me, see it as they do. By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not really interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that's a psychologist!

Ronan, for his part, couldn't quite believe how ordinary the people on Wall Street were. "It's a whole industry of bullshit," he said.

The consulting firm that eventually hired him was forever asking him to exhibit confidence when, in his view, confidence was a sign of fraudulence.

The CDC does not know how to pull the fire alarm. In fact, there is no fire alarm in this country.

is the ceding of technical and scientific leadership to China. It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses

The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos. "When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.

The experimental psychologist "rarely attributes a deviation of results from expectations to sampling variability because he finds a causal 'explanation' for any discrepancy

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions. And in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over and again in the draft you saw these crystal-clear pictures form in the minds of basketball experts which later proved a mirage.

I always felt a bit like a child in all this but having the eyes of a child and a sense of awe and no firmly held perspective to begin with was how I could help in some small way. I never had anything to unlearn.

Simply knowing about a bias wasn't sufficient to overcome it:

when each infected person infected more than three others, or when the society's rate of compliance fell below 30 percent.

Al hombre más torpe se le pueden explicar los temas más difíciles si no se ha formado todavía ninguna idea de ellos; pero no se puede aclarar ni aun lo más sencillo al hombre más inteligente si está firmemente convencido de que conoce ya, sin la menor sombra de duda, lo que se presenta ante él.   LIEV TOLSTÓI, 1897