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big part of a consultant’s job was to feign total certainty about uncertain things.
There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, “It’s impossible to know for sure.”
perfect answer didn’t exist, but statistics could get you to some answer that was at least a bit better than simply guessing.
knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.
“Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome.
“When things go wrong, that’s what people do,” said Morey. “They go back to the habits that succeeded in the past. My thing was: Let’s go back to first principles. If these physical tools are going to matter, let’s test them more rigorously than they’ve ever been tested before.
The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias
overvalued their own players whenever another team tried to trade for them.
“the endowment effect.”
“present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present.
“hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.
to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.
They make these judgments by, in effect, counting up the features they notice. And as the noticeability of features can be manipulated by the way they are highlighted, the sense of how similar two things are might also be manipulated.
changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.
Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.
“Because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean,” Danny later wrote, “it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”
People mistook even a very small part of a thing for the whole. Even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence.
the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.
We have a kind of stereotype of “randomness” that differs from true randomness.
The more easily people can call some scenario to mind—the more available it is to them—the more probable they find it to be. Any fact or incident that was especially vivid, or recent, or common—or anything that happened to preoccupy a person—was likely to be recalled with special ease,
People could be anchored with information that was totally irrelevant to the problem they were being asked to solve.
People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe In this match, surprises are expected Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable
useful way of thinking about base rates: They were what you would predict if you had no information at all.
“When no specific evidence is given, the prior probabilities are properly utilized; when worthless specific evidence is given, prior probabilities are ignored.”
Man’s inability to see the power of regression to the mean leaves him blind to the nature of the world around
People are very good at detecting patterns and trends even in random data.
Once we have adopted a particular hypothesis or interpretation, we grossly exaggerate the likelihood of that hypothesis, and find it very difficult to see things any other way.
take whatever facts they had observed (neglecting the many facts that they did not or could not observe) and make them fit neatly into a confident-sounding story:
“He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”
“You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That’s when you need to stop and check your thinking.”
a seeker of truth. He wanted to use data to find true patterns in human behavior, to replace the false ones that governed people’s lives
When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.
The nearer you came to achieving a thing, the greater the regret you experienced if you failed to achieve it.
The more control you felt you had over the outcome of a gamble, the greater the regret you experienced if the gamble turned out badly.
a fee that people paid, willingly, to avoid regret: a regret premium.
When choosing between sure things and gambles, people’s desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.
happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.”
people responded to changes rather than absolute levels.
“The emotions of unrealized possibility,”
Their intensity, Danny wrote, was a product of two variables: “the desirability of the alternative” and “the possibility of the alternative.”
The imagination obeyed rules: the rules of undoing. One rule was that the more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them.
“an event becomes gradually less changeable as it recedes into the past.”
The Linda problem resembled a Venn diagram of two circles, but with one of the circles wholly contained by the other. But people didn’t see the circles.
people chose the more detailed description, even though it was less probable, because it was more “representative.”
