Quotes About Knowledge

In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.

But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns

We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.

You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. 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.

The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

more intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.

teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.

Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer.

Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.

Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.

you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. WYSIATI facilitates the achievement of coherence and of the cognitive ease that causes us to accept a statement as true.

She has a coherent story that explains all she knows, and the coherence makes her feel good.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence

before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

System 1 will detect that a person described as "a meek and tidy soul, with a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail" resembles a caricature librarian, but combining this intuition with knowledge about the small number of librarians is a task that only System 2 can perform—if System 2 knows how to do so, which is true of few people.

The proof that you truly understand a pattern of behavior is that you know how to reverse it.

you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved—whether by their superiors or by a client—supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times.

Furthermore, System 2 has no control over the effect and no knowledge of it. The participants who have been exposed to random or absurd anchors (such as Gandhi's death at age 144) confidently deny that this obviously useless information could have influenced their estimate, and they are wrong.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.