Quotes About Learning

A necessary part of becoming a better decision-maker is learning from experience. Experience contains the lessons for improving future decisions. Resulting causes you to learn the wrong lessons.

Experience is supposed to be our best teacher, but sometimes we draw a connection between outcome quality and decision quality that is too tight.

Experience is necessary for learning. But we process that experience in a biased way. This means that the very feedback you need to become a better decision-maker can interfere with your ability to learn good lessons from experience.

I developed an exercise to practice and reinforce universalism. When I had the impulse to dismiss someone as a bad player, I made myself find something that they did well. It was an exercise I could do for myself, and I could get help from my group in analyzing the strategies I thought those players might be executing well. That commitment led to many benefits.

If we find the Achilles' heel," Teller told me, "thank God we found the Achilles' heel after $2 million instead of after $20 million.

Look how quickly you can begin to redefine what it means to be wrong. Once we start thinking like this, it becomes easier to resist the temptation to make snap judgments after results or say things like "I knew it" or "I should have known." Better decision-making and more self-compassion follow.

The benefits of recognizing just a few extra learning opportunities compound over time. The cumulative effect of being a little better at decision-making, like compounding interest, can have huge effects in the long run on everything that we do.

This is actually not that surprising. Outside of vague directives about encouraging critical-thinking skills, decision-making is not explicitly taught in K–12 education.

It is uncomfortable to think about the possibility of failure, but it's worth it to live in that discomfort because you will be better prepared if things don't turn out according to your ideal.

If you want some examples, go back to the very first questions I asked you: What were your best and worst decisions of the last year? The point of having you write those down is that most people don't actually think much about their best and worst decisions. They usually start by thinking of their best and worst outcomes and work backward from there. That's due to resulting.

Hindsight bias, like resulting, makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

When we have a negative opinion about the person delivering the message, we close our minds to what they are saying and miss a lot of learning opportunities because of it. Likewise, when we have a positive opinion of the messenger, we tend to accept the message without much vetting. Both are bad.

A lot of experience can be an excellent teacher. A single experience, not so much.

The size of the range signals what you know and what you don't know. The larger the range, the less information or the lower the quality of the information informing your estimate, and the more you need to learn. Communicating the size of the range also signals to others that you need their knowledge and perspective to narrow the range.

The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them.

I can say that Nick the Greek lost a lot of money based on his beliefs—or, more accurately, because he ignored lots of feedback that his strategy was a losing one. He eventually went broke because he didn't recognize learning opportunities as they arose.

Complex and open-minded thought is most likely to be activated when decision makers learn prior to forming any opinions that they will be accountable to an audience (a) whose views are unknown, (b) who is interested in accuracy, (c) who is reasonably well-informed, and (d) who has a legitimate reason for inquiring into the reasons behind participants' judgments/choices.

TED Talk, "The Pursuit of Ignorance.") In the book and the talk, Firestein

We can't just "absorb" experiences and expect to learn. As novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley recognized, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." There is a big difference between getting experience and becoming an expert. That difference lies in the ability to identify when the outcomes of our decisions have something to teach us and what that lesson might be.

Memory creep is the reconstruction of your memory of what you knew that hindsight bias creates.

Elle servait des pommes de terre et du lait du matin au soir pour que je sois assise dans un amphi à écouter parler de Platon

One cannot see the future of something learned.

Quand cela m'est arrivé par mégarde, je me rattrapais, je m'en voulais.

Une autre fois, sa stupéfaction a été sans bornes, de me voir parler anglais avec un auto-stoppeur qu'un client avait pris dans son camion. Que j'aie appris une langue étrangère en classe, sans aller dans le pays, le laissait incrédule.