Quotes About Analysis

whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean.

people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.

Indeed, we pay people quite well to provide interesting explanations of regression effects. A business commentator who correctly announces that "the business did better this year because it had done poorly last year" is likely to have a short tenure on the air.

When you take the long view of many similar decisions, you can see that paying a premium to avoid a small risk of a large loss is costly. A similar analysis applies to each of the cells of the fourfold pattern: systematic deviations from expected value are costly in the long run – and this rule applies to both risk aversion and risk seeing. Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes – a feature of intuitive decision making – eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn't stand a chance.

In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.

The gigantic samples allow extremely fine analyses, which have confirmed the importance of situational factors, physical health, and social contact in experienced well-being. Not surprisingly, a headache will make a person miserable, and the second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

These students can solve much more difficult problems when they are not tempted to accept a superficially plausible answer that comes readily to mind.

The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing

regression inevitably occurs when the correlation between two measures is less than perfect

extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples. This explanation is not causal.

Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.

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

I never met Meehl, but he was one of my heroes from the time I read his Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence.

When we substitute an easier question for the one we should be answering, errors are bound to occur.

Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.

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

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.

System 1 is much better at dealing with individuals than categories.

The proof that you truly understand a pattern of behavior is that you know how to reverse it.

the brain is a machine for jumping to conclusions

System 2 also is capable of a more systematic and careful approach to evidence, and of following a list of boxes that must be checked before making a decision

demonstrated experimentally, but few can actually be measured.