Quotes About Reflection

Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.

The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2. This is how you will proceed when you next encounter the Müller-Lyer illusion. When you see lines with fins pointing in different directions, you will recognize the situation as one in which you should not trust your impressions of length.

What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I'll have to start over and search my memory deliberately.

Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2.

do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior

most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

We must allow for that uncertainty in our thinking.

an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are

When asked how much they will pay to get overnight delivery of a book they have ordered, the low scorers on the Cognitive Reflection Test are willing to pay twice as much as the high scorers.

The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.

Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living. The only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

The answer to this question may surprise you, but it is straightforward: you get pleasure (or displeasure) from your car when you think about your car, which is probably not very often.

but the chapters we wrote first were probably easier than others

But System 2 is not merely an apologist for System 1; it also prevents many foolish thoughts and inappropriate impulses from overt expression.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behaviours than from hearing surprising facts from the behaviour of others

Every author, I suppose, has in mind a setting in which readers of his or her work could benefit from having read it.

I can best describe our state as a form of lethargy- an unwillingness to think about what had happened. So we carried on.

What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

You seem to be devoting your entire vacation to the construction of memories. Perhaps you should put away the camera and enjoy the moment, even if it is not very memorable?

you should know that correcting your intuitions may complicate your life.

Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there.

The experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of 'pastness' that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience.