Quotes About Judgment

Relying on causal thinking about a single case is a source of predictable errors. Taking the statistical view, which we will also call the outside view, is a way to avoid these errors.

We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explored these so-called expert predictions in a landmark twenty-year study, which he published in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Errors are bound to occur when a judgment of similarity is substituted for a judgment of probability

For embezzlement actions that were similar to one another, one man was sentenced to 117 days in prison, while another was sentenced to 20 years.

They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.

The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let's not substitute.

judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

If the individual has relevant expertise, she will recognize the situation, and the intuitive solution that comes to her mind is likely to be correct. This

The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing

for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The

Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability.

high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

bias is a compelling figure, while noise is the background to which we pay no attention. That is how we remain largely unaware of a large flaw in our judgment.

Variability in judgments is also expected and welcome in a competitive situation in which the best judgments will be rewarded.

prepared for the future as you could be. An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.