Quotes About Story

The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions.

overconfidence is a direct consequence of features of System 1 that can be tamed—but not vanquished. The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it.

System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

SPEAKING OF PRIMING "The sight of all these people in uniforms does not prime creativity." "The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works." "They were primed to find flaws, and this is exactly what they found." "His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us." "I made myself smile and I'm actually feeling better!

We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But

Most importantly, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.

la confianza viene determinada por la coherencia de la mejor historia que podamos contar partiendo de la evidencia.

Surprise then activates and orients your attention: you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the surprising event.

System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence—and it is not designed to know the size of its jumps. Because of WYSIATI, only the evidence at hand counts. Because of confidence by coherence, the subjective confidence we have in our opinions reflects the coherence of the story that System 1 and System 2 have constructed. The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story.

A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.

She has a coherent story that explains all she knows, and the coherence makes her feel good.

We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true.

time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and

Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.

We will not learn to understand regression from experience. Even when a regression is identified, as we saw in the story of the flight instructors, it will be given a causal interpretation that is almost always wrong.

The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it.

An essential design feature of the associative machine is that it represents only activated ideas. Information that is not retrieved (even unconsciously) from memory might as well not exist. System 1 excels at constructing the best possible story that incorporates ideas currently activated, but it does not (cannot) allow for information it does not have.

poor evidence can make a very good story.

His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. WYSIATI