Quotes About Decision-making

A professional soldier must also be a realist. There is a time to attack, and a time to retreat. There is a time to press for victory, and a time to accept its impossibility. Only fools and tyrants deny the inevitable.

If you find yourself mapping a "whether or not" question, you're almost always better off turning it into a "which one" question that gives you more available paths.

With the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren't used to this combination, the results can be expensive.

This means flow packs a double punch: it doesn't just increase our decision-making abilities—it increases our creative decision-making abilities. Dramatically.

smarter people tend to think more like economists

To make decisions "rationally," by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth:

Kahneman and Tversky conclude that people are not risk-averse across the board, though they are loss-averse: they seek risk if it may avoid a loss.29

downslopes in the curve show that at various times Algeria, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Romania, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia have pursued nuclear weapons but then thought the better of it—occasionally through the persuasion of an Israeli air strike, but more often by choice.

The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.

one can imagine a leader who has a changing willingness to suffer a cost over time, increasing as the conflict proceeds and his resolve toughens. His motto would be: "We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain." This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

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loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals.

One of the most commonly cited human irrationalities is the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people continue to invest in a losing venture because of what they have invested so far rather than in anticipation of what they will gain going forward.

I grew up always admiring business owners. I was always interested in knowing who pulled what strings. I've always been in love with the decision making process, not just the product.

There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.

You may come to ask yourself, "What should I do today?" in a manner that means "How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?

You've all decided to sacrifice the future to the present. You don't talk about it. You don't all get together and say, "Let's take the easier path. Let's indulge in whatever the moment might bring. And let's agree, further, not to call each other on it.

Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don't waste time questioning how you know that what you're doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.

So, I must take the complexity of the world, reduce it to a single point so that I can act, and take everyone else and their future selves into consideration while I am doing so.

What should you do, when you don't know what to do? Tell the truth.

se puede conseguir algo mejor en el futuro renunciando a algo valioso en el presente.

A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently—even ambitiously—for its solution, with other people, in the most efficient manner possible (efficient, because there are other problems to solve, and efficiency allows for the conservation of resources that might then be devoted importantly elsewhere).

And, since we don't know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice about how to live.