Quotes About Comparison

I think money is essential to happiness and right now I wouldn't want to be anyone other than Wilbur Smith - I've had a fantastic life, rewarded far more heavily than I deserve. Maybe I'd like to be J. K. Rowling, but I'll settle for second best.

Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together.

It would not bother me if another scientist wanted to reduce my thirst for knowledge to the biological function of a puppy who goes around sniffing at everything. Indeed, it would make me happy to be biologically compared to a lively and lovable puppy.

The pre-frontal region of the Peking man resembles that found in some parts of the Middle West.

Men are superior to women, for one thing they can urinate from a speeding car.

The third principle is loss aversion. When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains. This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative expectations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.

When you say 'quite clever,' which reference group do you have in mind?

The truth is that small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable.

Adam switches from a gas-guzzler of 12 mpg to a slightly less voracious guzzler that runs at 14 mpg. The environmentally virtuous Beth switches from a 30 mpg car to one that runs at 40 mpg.

We found that American women spent about 19% of the time in an unpleasant state, somewhat higher than French women (16%) or Danish women (14%).

The comparison of firms that have been more or less successful is to a significant extent a comparison between firms that have been more or less lucky.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

to put it differently, you are not always the same person, and you are less consistent over time than you think. But somewhat reassuringly, you are more similar to yourself yesterday than you are to another person today.

In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.

Variability in judgments is also expected and welcome in a competitive situation in which the best judgments will be rewarded.

people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.

The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment.

Whatever their flaws, rankings are less noisy than ratings.

Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them." —

The difference between that man and me," Alan Mendelsohn said, "is that I am a connoisseur, and he is a fanatic.

I was in my late thirties at the time, and Phillip was looking for someone a bit younger. When he met lovely Lindsay Morgan, a yoga enthusiast and model twelve years my junior, he dropped me like an underperforming stock.

What's wrong with my gun?" "It's rather small, Mr. Bond.

As a result he hated Gabriel, in the way a second son hates an elder

If a man receives thirteen coins, he will hanker after sixteen, and possessing them he considers life unbearable unless he now earns forty. Nature, it might be observed, imposes strict boundaries on a person's height and age span, so that in even the most extreme instances no one can rise or fall too far or too short from the rest, whereas no such boundary inhibits money.