Quotes About Influence

After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.

the right word," Simpson said later. "He seemed completely intimidated by authority.

By early 2019 Max was worrying aloud that he might not have enough nominees for his awards show, and that the ones he did get would all have the same story: how they kept the government alive even after the president tried to kill it.

To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.

Despite Tokyo's astronomical land prices, anyone within earshot of real power commands a room the size of a basketball court in which to host those famous consensus-building sessions. If you want to measure a Japanese man's clout, get him to show you his conference room.

stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.

He thought of the computer as a less than straightforward tool for controlling and manipulating the world around it, like a shovel with a loose blade.

it became clear that Trump's approach to government management was only a part of the story, and maybe not even the bigger part. As one of my characters put it, "Trump was a comorbidity.

Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world.

For people to accept the yoke, they must believe they have no choice.

The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person's reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.

We are the only reason your shitty state is standing.

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

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.

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

If perception had the power to overwhelm reality in such a simple case, how much power might it have in a more complicated one?

Slavitt renamed the plan "Victory over COVID-19" and presented it to Kushner as his own.

the CDC, under Robert Redfield, had been disgraced. It had let itself be used by the Trump administration to lead the United States in a direction opposite to the direction the United States had once led the world.

The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United States had the nerve to make it.

If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.

I hated discussing ideas with investors, he said, because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process. Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.

He attracted followers as a magnet attracts filings. In other words, he was exactly the right man to take an inherently implausible idea and lead others to believe in it.

There is an ancient rule of financial life—if you owe the bank 5 million bucks, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 5 billion bucks, you own the bank—that

the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. "Trump was like . . . I love the Bangles! You know that song 'Walk Like an Egyptian'?" recalled one of his advisers on