Quotes About Judgment

If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn't shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were "conservative Bayesians.

One list consisted of nineteen male names and twenty female names, the other of twenty female names and nineteen male names. The list that had more female names on it had more names of famous men, and the list that had more male names on it contained the names of more famous women. The unsuspecting Oregon students, having listened to a list, were then asked to judge if it contained the names of more men or more women.

El mero acto de la clasificación refuerza los estereotipos. Si queremos debilitar un estereotipo, eliminemos la clasificación.

Why is it that people channel so many of their hang-ups about people who are poor or unsuccessful into the food-stamps program?" asks Concannon as we settle into our chairs, then answers his own question.

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.

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?

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

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

began by pointing out the small mountain of research that suggested that expert judgment was less reliable than algorithms.

That guy might look like Arnold but it can't possibly be Arnold because Arnold would never be out alone on a bike at seven in the morning, trying to commit suicide.

Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.

Cuando no tenemos evidencia concreta, utilizamos correctamente las probabilidades básicas; cuando disponemos de evidencia concreta pero inútil, no se tienen en cuenta las probabilidades básicas

recalls Avishai Margalit. "You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won't repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.

He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, "All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.

Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don't even realize it is happening

The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?' he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.

Moses could have walked in the door, and if he said he came from fixed income, Vinny wouldn't have trusted him

What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.

Southerners are an easygoing race when it comes to aberrations of conduct. They will react with anger if something out of the ordinary is presented as a possible future occurrence; but if an unusual circumstance is discovered to be an established fact, they will usually accept it without rancor or judgment as part of the normal order of things.

Whenever Thomas Edison was about to hire a new employee, he would invite the applicant over for a bowl of soup. If the person salted his soup before tasting it, Edison would not offer him the job. He did not hire people who had too many assumptions built into their everyday life. Edison wanted people who consistently challenged assumptions.

Our world must be hell, then. It must be the hell of some other place where all of us committed atrocious sins of some sort, and now we're stuck here until we die and either come back or are whisked off to some other hell. It couldn't be worse than this one, though.

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

Power is neither good nor evil. It is the use one makes of it which is good or evil.

I cannot justify my actions. Roldero had said that men must be judged by their deeds, not their motives. I offer such speculation only n the hope that by understanding our motives we may thus control our deeds.