Quotes About Decision-making

Aristotle said all human actions have one or more of seven causes.  Chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Responsibility is powerful when thought of in its positive sense. It is the ability to choose our responses.

When you get your, 'Who am I?', question right, all of your, 'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves." ~ Richard Rohr

It's not what we do that makes us tired—it's what we don't do.

The problem is our ignorance. We have to own up to it. We're the species that, in the New Mexican desert in 1945, wondered if our new experiment might ignite the atmosphere and incinerate the Earth. We discussed it and thought it unlikely, but we could not be certain. Yet we went ahead and exploded the first atomic bomb anyway.

Sin una matemática sólida, los negocios se convierten en un costoso juego de azar en el que uno apuesta su propio dinero y también el ajeno.

Having something pinned down can have a focusing effect, where a blank canvas with its unlimited options—while it sounds liberating—can have a paralyzing effect.

When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What

it's better to strive for a good solution and avoid disaster rather than trying to find the best solution

He pointed out that he tended to live the life of a vagabond because he could never fully commit himself to one place or one job. He rented a television set because he could never settle on just which set to buy, and noted that most major purchases were difficult or impossible to deal with.

Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.

With any problem, it's important to figure out which incentives will actually work, not just what your moral compass tells you should work.

People aren't "good" or "bad." People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.

Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do.

People are complicated creatures, with a nuanced set of private and public incentives, and that our behavior is enormously influenced by circumstances.

La gente no es «buena» ni «mala». Las personas son personas y responden a incentivos. Casi siempre pueden ser manipuladas —para bien o para mal— si se encuentran las palancas adecuadas.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass.

Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn't like the idea of quitting.

is a systematic means of describing how people make decisions and how they change their minds;

If asked how we'd behave in a situation that pits a private benefit against the greater good, most of us won't admit to favoring the private benefit. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.

Cuando a la gente no se la obliga a pagar todos los costes de sus acciones, tiene pocos incentivos para cambiar de conducta.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

there is one mantra a Freak lives by, it is this: people respond to incentives. As utterly obvious as this point may seem, we are amazed at how frequently people forget it, and how often it leads to their undoing. Understanding the incentives of all the players in a given scenario is a fundamental step in solving any problem.

But if you want to think like a Freak, you must learn to be a master of incentives—the good, the bad, and the ugly.