Quotes About Evidence

Nick Epley and Tom Gilovich found evidence that adjustment is a deliberate attempt to find reasons to move away from the anchor:

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. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas

the prediction of the future is not distinguished from an evaluation of current evidence—prediction matches evaluation. This is perhaps the best evidence we have for the role of substitution.

Richer and more realistic assumptions do not suffice to make a theory successful. Scientists

For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering

people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

There is good reason to believe that the administration of justice is infected by predictable incoherence in several domains. The evidence is drawn in part from experiments, including studies of mock juries, and in part from observation of patterns in legislation, regulation, and litigation.

Overconfidence: As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.

Intuitive predictions are almost completely insensitive to the actual predictive quality of the evidence.

Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. As the jurist Cass Sunstein points out, the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing.

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.

Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. Typically at least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.

People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.

I never met Meehl, but he was one of my heroes from the time I read his Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence.

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.

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

There is one thing you can do when you have doubts about the quality of the evidence: let your judgments of probability stay close to the base rate. Don't expect this exercise of discipline to be easy—it requires a significant effort of self-monitoring and self-control.

She has no evidence for saying that the firm is badly managed. All she knows is that its stock has gone down. This is an outcome bias, part hindsight and part halo effect." "Let's not fall for the outcome bias. This was a stupid decision even though it worked out well.

you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician, published the first scientific paper suggesting the use of fingerprints as an identification technique.

More generally, the financial benefits of self-employment are mediocre: given the same qualifications, people achieve higher average return by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own. The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. Psychologists have confirmed that most people genuinely believe they are superior to most others on most desirable traits - they are willing to bet small amounts of money on these beliefs in the laboratory.