Quotes About Illusion

The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.

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.

WYSIATI—what you see is all there is.

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.

Many intelligent and well-informed people were keenly interested in the future of the economy and did not believe a catastrophe was imminent; I infer from this fact that the crisis was not knowable. What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.

People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so. On most occasions, however, the lazy System 2 will adopt the suggestions of System 1 and march on.

El mundo que imaginamos no es una réplica precisa de la realidad;

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.

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

It is difficult to imagine people lining up at airport bookstores to buy a book that enthusiastically describes the practices of business leaders who, on average, do somewhat better than chance. Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory.

The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times.

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

we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

For the insurance company, the illusion of agreement was shattered only by the noise audit. How had the leaders of the company remained unaware of their noise problem? There are several possible answers here, but one that seems to play a large role in many settings is simply the discomfort of disagreement.

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

Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory.

people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.

People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so.

Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Warum er traurig war? [...] Weil die Welt sich so enttäuschend ausnahm, sobald man erkannte, wie dünn ihr Gewebe war, wie grob gestrickt die Illusion, wie laienhaft vernäht ihre Rückseite. Weil nur Geheimnis und Vergessen es erträglich machten. Weil man es ohne den Schlaf, der einen täglich aus der Wirklichkeit riß, nicht aushielt. Nicht Wegsehenkönnen war Traurigkeit. Wachsein war Traurigkeit. Erkennen [...] war Verzweiflung. [...] Weil die Zeit immer verging.

What should he do if word went around that in his throne room hung a magic picture that only the highborn could see, but he couldn't? Of course there was no picture there, it had been one of the fool's jokes, but now that the canvas hung there, it had developed its own power.