Quotes About Decision-making

The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds," Danny wrote. "We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.

At other places management says, 'Well, gee, fellas, do we really want to bet the ranch on this deal?' Lewie was not only willing to bet the ranch. He was willing to hire people and let them bet the ranch, too. His attitude was: 'Sure, what the fuck, it's only a ranch.

The math of the matter changed with the situation, but, broadly speaking, an attempted steal had to succeed about 70 percent of the time before it contributed positively to run totals.

If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn't shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were "conservative Bayesians.

I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe," said Alderson. "They don't get criticized for it.

The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person's reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.

Redelmeier was newly struck by the inability of human beings to judge risks, even when their misjudgment might kill them.

But Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team.

The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United States had the nerve to make it.

If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.

In Danny and Amos's working theory, the paradox was now resolved differently. It wasn't that (or at least not only that) people anticipated regret when making a decision in the first situation that they did not anticipate in making the second. It was that they treated 50 percent as more than 50 percent and saw the difference between 4 percent and 2 percent as far less than it was.

Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.

Cuando no tenemos evidencia concreta, utilizamos correctamente las probabilidades básicas; cuando disponemos de evidencia concreta pero inútil, no se tienen en cuenta las probabilidades básicas

They stopped thinking like social justice warriors and became parents. Of course if there was a real risk of disease killing their children they'd keep their kids home from school!

You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can't outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not.

Mental masturbation is actually an important concept. It's when you talk in circles for an hour and reach no decision.

Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team. "Your mind needs to be in a constant state of defense against all this crap that is trying to mislead you," he said. "We're always trying to figure out what's a trick and what's real. Are we seeing a hologram? Is this an illusion?

One of Leibowitz's favorite stories was about a donkey placed equidistant from two bundles of hay. In the story the donkey can't decide which bundle of hay is closer to him, and so dies of hunger.

Danny the whole idea of proving that people weren't rational felt a bit like proving that people didn't have fur. Obviously people were not rational, in any meaningful sense of that term.

What was the point of laying out the odds of a gamble if the person taking it either didn't believe the numbers or didn't want to know them.

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.

The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.

I always knew that I wanted to work and I knew I wanted to be a singer and an actor. I knew that every choice I made would help me get to that point. So the better the choices I made, the more of a chance I would have to get to where I wanted to be.

There are some singers that know exactly when to go, and others hang on much too long and that is the same, that is the same with judges.