Quotes About Awareness

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.

he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.

First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.

Please, don't drive a school bus blindfolded.

This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.

it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.

Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent "studying" the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.

If you need to listen to music while walking, don't walk; and please don't listen to music.

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However

We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet

We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day

ignoramus et ignorabimus—we are ignorant and will remain so. Somehow

Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.

the cycles of risk taking in the economy as following a pattern: stability and absence of crises encourage risk taking, complacency, and lowered awareness of the possibility of problems. Then

He defaults to thinking that what he doesn't see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.

Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.

awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.