Quotes About Decision-making

nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make.

Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is...? ...ourselves.

Per gyvenim? tave veda tavyje esanti, ištroškusi mokymosi, žaisminga dvasin? b?tyb?, kuri ir yra tavo asmenyb?s esm?. Nenusigr?žk nuo jokios galimos ateities prieš tai ne?sitikin?s, kad iš jos n?ra ko išmokti. Tu visuomet gali laisvai apsispr?sti. Gali persigalvoti ir pasirinkti kitoki? ateit? arba kitoki? praeit?.

The first fact was that if Heidi hadn't picked that particular day to try out a little autoeroticism, Halleck would have been on top of his job and his responsibility as the operator of a motor vehicle

Trust your intuitive heart. How often have you said to yourself, after the fact, "I knew I should have done that"? How often do you intuitively know something but allow yourself to think yourself out of it?

If you don't want to "sweat the small stuff," it's critical that you choose your battles wisely.

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.

Parsimony is always in the forefront of a scientist's mind when choosing between theories, but it isn't always obvious how to judge it.

It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used—against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them—to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles.

We may find the attractions of a particular member of the opposite sex irresistible, even though the better judgment of our better self tells us that a liaison with that person is not in anyone's long-term interests.

I'll begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don't understand the evidence, or haven't time to read the evidence, etc.).

Whatever the philosophical problems raised by consciousness, for the purpose of this story it can be thought of as the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes. [The Selfish Gene]

He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.

there's no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one—only plenty of wrong ways.

A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.

The combination of loss aversion with mindless choosing implies that if an option is designated as the "default," it will attract a large market share. Default options thus act as powerful nudges.

The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.

people have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option.

The first misconception is that it is possible to avoid influencing people's choices.

Libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened.

The more choices you give people, the more help with decision making you need to provide.

So to put it simply, forcing people to choose is not always wise, and remaining neutral is not always possible.

The core premise of economic theory is that people choose by optimizing.

the current situation being a toss-up as to what you want to believe. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. Hence you will find that often what you believe is what you want to believe, rather than being the result of careful thinking.