Quotes About Illusion

the illusion of valid prediction remains intact, a fact that is exploited by people whose business is prediction—not only financial experts but pundits in business and politics, too.

The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.

Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly," Tetlock writes.

But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns

For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage

In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

It might seem odd to emphasize this point, since we noted in the previous chapter that aggregating the judgments of multiple individuals reduces noise. But because of group dynamics, groups can add noise, too. There are "wise crowds," whose mean judgment is close to the correct answer, but there are also crowds that follow tyrants, that fuel market bubbles, that believe in magic, or that are under the sway of a shared illusion.

We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.

Michotte had a different idea: he argued that we see causality, just as directly as we see color.

Most of us, most of the time, live with the unquestioned belief that the world looks as it does because that's the way it is.

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

Any aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation. This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true.

The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2. This is how you will proceed when you next encounter the Müller-Lyer illusion. When you see lines with fins pointing in different directions, you will recognize the situation as one in which you should not trust your impressions of length.

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness.

Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.

We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign—like the fins on the parallel lines. It is an illusion—a cognitive illusion—and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it. The question that is most often asked

The essence of the focusing illusion is WYSIATI, giving too much weight to the climate, too little to all the other determinants of well-being.

This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The observation that "90% of drivers believe they are better than average" is a well-established psychological finding that has become part of the culture, and it often comes up as a prime example of a more general above-average effect.

Moses illusion.

you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. WYSIATI facilitates the achievement of coherence and of the cognitive ease that causes us to accept a statement as true.