Quotes About Reasoning

I always thought that common sense would prevail. But on a game show, there is no common sense.

The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five.

If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics.

Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka.

only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent. A rational person can believe in ghosts so long as all her other beliefs are consistent with the existence of ghosts. A rational person can prefer being hated over being loved, so long as his preferences are consistent. Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct.

Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

How closely does System 2 monitor the suggestions of System 1? His reasoning was that we know a significant fact about anyone who says that the ball costs 10¢: that person did not actively check whether the answer was correct, and her System 2 endorsed an intuitive answer that it could have rejected with a small investment of effort.

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.

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.

The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant.

The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning. Statistical thinking derives conclusions about individual cases from properties of categories and ensembles. Unfortunately, System 1 does not have the capability for this mode of reasoning; System 2 can learn to think statistically, but few people receive the necessary training.

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.

The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding our world.

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