Quotes About Judgment

My research collaborator Don Moore points out that police officers spend a lot of time figuring out who is telling the truth and who is lying, but research has found they aren't nearly as good at it as they think they are and they tend not to get better with experience. That's because experience isn't enough. It must be accompanied by clear feedback.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias.

A forecaster who doesn't adjust her views in light of new information won't capture the value of that information, while a forecaster who is so impressed by the new information that he bases his forecast entirely on it will lose the value of the old information that underpinned his prior forecast. But the forecaster who carefully balances old and new captures the value in both—and puts it into her new forecast. The best way to do that is by updating often but bit by bit.

Physicians and the institutions they controlled didn't want to let go of the idea that their judgment alone revealed the truth, so they kept doing what they did because they had always done it that way—and they were backed up by respected authority. They didn't need scientific validation. They just knew. Cochrane despised this attitude. He called it "the God complex.

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.

Here's my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Popular books often draw a dichotomy between intuition and analysis—"blink" versus "think"—and pick one or the other as the way to go. I am more of a thinker than a blinker, but blink-think is another false dichotomy. The choice isn't either/or, it is how to blend them in evolving situations.

It was the earliest demonstration of a phenomenon popularized by—and now named for—James Surowiecki's bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds. Aggregating the judgment of many consistently beats the accuracy of the average member of the group, and is often as startlingly accurate as Galton's weight-guessers.

explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.

Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.

Rice University found that people judge sounds that increase or decrease in pitch to be longer than sounds of the same duration and constant pitch. The direction of change does not matter. The amount of change drives the effect.

Do you habitually find fault instead of looking for signs of goodness? Can you transform your disdain into a kinder feeling? Remember, you'll be doing it not for the other person, but to protect your soul from toxic emotions.

This is how foreign grace was to her, that when she heard it she mistook it for heresy. There are some people, I am sorry to say, who wouldn't recognize grace if it stood at their door wearing a name tag.

Era típico de uma prostituta arranjar um nome pomposo. Havia alturas em que pensava que a única razão por que as raparigas entravam neste ramo de actividade era para arranjarem um nome novo e bonito.

Farraj looked at me with the clinical distaste of a chiropodist regarding a septic toenail.

There's only one thing that unnerves me more than the company of an ugly woman in the evening, and that's the company of the same ugly woman the following morning.

he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying.

To be nobly bornIs now a crime.

Paul said it would be better for them to express their views back in Britain, because "there, people listen a bit more. In America, they hold everything against you.

After meeting John, my father took me aside and said, "The other one was better looking.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

Our best feelings, which God himself has planted in our hearts, instinctively revolt against the thought that a God of infinite love and justice should create millions of immortal beings in his own image—probably more than half of the human race—in order to hurry them from the womb to the tomb, and from the tomb to everlasting doom!

To summarize: organizations are technical instruments, designed as means to definite goals. They are judged on engineering premises; they are expendable. Institutions, whether conceived as groups or practices, may be partly engineered, but they have also a "natural" dimension. They {22} are products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.

People used to be funny about approaching me, but now they seem to think I'm as sane as anyone who's done what I've done in movies can be.