Quotes About Awareness

never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact—and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings." Likewise, never ask a trader if he is profitable; you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If

It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.

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

In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.

Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do-except, of course, when we think about it.

The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious).

You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.

We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.

Once again, I am not saying that we need to stop globalization and prevent travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the tradeoffs—and few people are. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.

It is often said that is wise he who can see things coming. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*

Usually, what we call a "good listener" is someone with skillfully polished indifference.

you are rewarded for perception, not results.

Out of sight, out of mind: we harbor a natural, even physical, scorn of the abstract.

Como veíamos antes, los casos de desconfirmación tienen mucha más fuerza para establecer la verdad. Sin embargo, tendemos a no ser conscientes de esta propiedad.

Every additional glass of wine harms you more than the preceding one

All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.

You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet we tend to not be aware of this property.

that is often associated with classroom knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what's going on in real life.

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools—by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category

if you need to be continuously on the watch, doesn't that cause fatigue?

People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention.

people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)