Daniel Simons > Quotes

“We pay attention to what we are told to attend to, or what we're looking for, or what we already know...what we see is amazingly limited.”
― Daniel Simons

“people will focus on procedures and not notice anything that isn't just part of the procedures”
― Daniel Simons

“we tend to make decisions using only information about the planes we see and rarely even think of the ones that didn’t come back.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Remaining uncertain can be aversive and does not necessarily come naturally, but it is a habit we should cultivate whenever we can. We don’t need to distrust everything we hear, but we should make a practice of taking a beat, remaining uncertain, and asking ourselves, “Is that really true?”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“The “bullshit asymmetry principle” states that the amount of energy needed to refute a heap of nonsense is an order of magnitude greater than that required to produce it.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Inviting critics into your tent—a process known in science as adversarial collaboration—may not come naturally, but it can pay big dividends.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“It can pay to seek more information, even if we don’t receive it, because the fact that the facts were hard or impossible to find is itself information.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“The statistician Andrew Gelman has suggested a useful antidote for the tendency to accept the truth of whatever came first: Use the “time-reversal heuristic.” Imagine what you would think if the information had reached you in the opposite order. If you heard that a study of seven thousand people found no effect and then a later, identical study of just forty people found an effect, you would not give the smaller study much credence.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Asking “What’s missing?” is like thinking of the bullet-ridden airplane graphic to remind us that we might be looking only at survivors, not at everyone who started out with the same mission or goal. Once we bring those other three possibilities to mind and consider the information we don’t have in front of us, it often becomes clear that instead of evidence, we have only coincidence.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Sets of truly random numbers, especially if you have only ten of them, will have some anomalies if you look at them in enough ways.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Economists define the opportunity cost of a purchase as the next-best use for the money spent—in other words, the most valuable opportunity passed up by the decision to make a purchase.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“When we experience surprise, it often signals that we committed prematurely to a belief when we should have remained uncertain.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“if you look at a real dataset with the expectation that something is odd, you’ll find what you are looking for. It is a common trap for inexperienced data detectives to claim evidence of fraud from an unusual pattern alone, especially if they inspect the data first, notice the suspicious pattern next (rather than plan in advance to search for it specifically), and only then calculate exactly how unusual it is. The result can be superficially compelling but false allegations of fraud.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Humans operate with a “truth bias”—we tend to assume that what we see and hear is true until and unless we get clear evidence otherwise. We hear now, believe right away, and only occasionally check later.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Great leaders are willing to change their minds when the facts change; updating beliefs in response to new evidence is, in fact, the rational thing to do.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“We should be especially wary when a story is conveyed with utter certainty, because the confidence of con artists can accelerate our tendency to accept without checking.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“Asking “What better options do you have?” or “What are your two best options?” might work better than asking “Are there any other options?” which invites a “No” response.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“An absence of noise, of the human tendency to make occasional blunders in complex situations, is a critical signal.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“To guard against being deceived in these and similar ways, ask yourself, “What am I assuming?” before making big purchases, agreements, or investments and before drawing conclusions.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“corporate decision-making can be so superficial that it’s worth being a minor nuisance by asking for what’s missing and explaining why it’s important.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It

“When something seems improbable, that should prompt you to investigate by asking more questions.”
― Daniel Simons, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It