Quotes About Reference points

Once you recognize the break-even effect and the house money effect, it is easy to spot them in everyday life. It occurs whenever there are two salient reference points, for instance where you started and where you are right now. The house money effect—along with a tendency to extrapolate recent returns into the future—facilitates financial bubbles.

The sketches were uncanny, almost photographic in quality. Reference points were given; the viewers described the surrounding terrain and landmarks. There were even sketches showing the aircraft's location in relation to the Ecuadorean search teams. In every sketch there was a phantom, a transparent body: sort of a self portrait of the viewer in the target area.

the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points—and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort; reference points, a disguise for what will always change.

Events and experiences in life determine our attitude. If we have a positive experience with a person, our attitude towards him is likely to be positive and conversely negative experiences tend to make us cautious. Experiences and events become reference points in our lives and we draw conclusions which serve as guidelines for the future.

We use reference points in our heads, say sales projections, and start building beliefs around them because less mental effort is needed to compare an idea to a reference point than to evaluate it in the absolute (System 1 at work!). We cannot work without a point of reference.

For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.

Zoners, highway planners, legislators, land-use planners, and parks and playground planners—none of whom live in an ideological vacuum—constantly use, as fixed points of reference, these two powerful visions and the more sophisticated merged vision.

In 2004, India was doing extraordinarily well. The middle class had begun to look to the West for its reference points. Foreign companies rushed to invest in the economy. Commentators removed the old hyphenation of India-Pakistan and began a new one: India-China.

In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.