Quotes About Insight

or "the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge or competence.

Steven D. Levitt

As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "[W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Smart people love to make smart-sounding predictions, no matter how wrong they may turn out to be.

Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt

Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a deep breath—ultracrepidarianism, or "the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge or competence.

The absurdly talented George Bernard Shaw—a world-class writer and a founder of the London School of Economics—noted this thought deficit many years ago. "Few people think more than two or three times a year," Shaw reportedly said. "I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week." We too try to think once.

Daniel Kahneman has written: "[W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

asimetría de la información, un estado en el que en una transacción una de las partes posee mejor información que otra.

Tetlock's words, even when their predictions prove.

Every big problem has been thought about endlessly by people much smarter than we are. The fact that it remains a problem means it is too damned hard to be cracked in full.

The key is to learn to climb inside other people's minds to figure out what really matters to them.

really care about, not what they say they care about. 2. Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide. 3. Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises

But while there are exceptions to every rule, it's also good to know the rule.

A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it. Our job in this book is to come up with such questions.

If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.

The key is to learn to climb inside other people's minds to figure out what really matters to them.

A few lines of reasoning can change the way we see the world.

But when something is easy to imagine, it's often because you've failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.

Freakonomics is out to dazzle you with facts; The Armchair Economist is out to dazzle you with logic.

Logic matters. It leads us from simple ideas to surprising conclusions.

Geniuses don't go mad," he said. "That's what people don't understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before.