Quotes About Understanding

So this is my aim for watercooler conversations: improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. In at least some cases, an accurate diagnosis may suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause.

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.

true experts know the limits of their knowledge.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. Memory

Little repetition is needed for learning.

You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

it is hard to agree with reality if you cannot agree with yourself.

Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.

Everything makes sense in hindsight.

Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

Risk" does not exist "out there," independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of "risk" to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as "real risk" or "objective risk.

answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born.

your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on.

She is a hedgehog. She has a theory that explains everything, and it gives her the illusion that she understands the world.

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My

When experts and the public disagree on their priorities, he says, "Each side must respect the insights and intelligence of the other.

Our understanding of cognitive ease and associative coherence locates subjective confidence firmly in System 1.

We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, "without knowing how he knows." However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter.

The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding our world.

I found in the collaboration was that Amos frequently saw the point of my vague ideas much more clearly than I did.

The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance.

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.