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the endowment effect, confirmation bias, and others. There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.
Why had so much conventional wisdom been bullshit? And not just in sports but across the whole society. Why had so many industries been ripe for disruption? Why was there so much to be undone?
to a conviction that they had deep insights into human nature but lacked the literary power to write a decent novel,
By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.
mind. If the mind, when it was making probabilistic judgments about an uncertain world, was not an intuitive statistician, what was it? If it wasn’t doing what the leading social scientists thought it did, and economic theory assumed that it did, what, exactly, was it doing?
“Consequently,” Amos and Danny wrote, “the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.” Human judgment was distorted by … the memorable.
People making choices, especially choices between gambles for small sums of money, made them in terms of gains and losses; they weren’t thinking about absolute levels.
people could be systematically wrong, their mistakes couldn’t be ignored. The irrational behavior of the few would not be offset by the rational behavior of the many. People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too.
