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September 10 - September 10, 2019
“We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”
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
A prediction is a judgment that involves uncertainty.
In the course of our personal and professional lives, we often run into situations that appear puzzling at first blush. We cannot see for the life of us why Mr. X acted in a particular way, we cannot understand how the experimental results came out the way they did, etc. Typically, however, within a very short time we come up with an explanation, a hypothesis, or an interpretation of the facts that renders them understandable, coherent, or natural. The same phenomenon is observed in perception. People are very good at detecting patterns and trends even in random data. In contrast to our skill
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make explicit the thinking that went into their decisions
“Wherever there is uncertainty there has got to be judgment,”
It wasn’t that what first came to mind was always wrong; it was that its existence in your mind led you to feel more certain than you should be that it was correct.
To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.
People facing a life-and-death decision responded not to the odds but to the way the odds were described to them.
A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.
They connected with each other more deeply than either had connected with anyone else. Their wives noticed it. “Their relationship was more intense than a marriage,”
They were fighting for their friends. Or for their families. Not for the nation. Not for Zionism. At the time it was a huge realization.”
They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes—whether it turned out to be right or wrong—but by the process that led to it.
The job of the decision maker wasn’t to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
“We have attempted to teach people to be aware of the pitfalls and fallacies of their own reasoning,”
“People will choose whatever they most want”
The understanding of any decision had to account not just for the financial consequences but for the emotional ones, too.
“It is the anticipation of regret that affects decisions, along with the anticipation of other consequences.”
What might have been is an essential
component of misery,’ ” he wrote to Amos. “There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.”
People did not seek to avoid other emotions with the same energy they sought to avoid regret.
suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person’s lottery ticket, the less regret they felt.
“The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo,”
“When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.”
The nearer you came to achieving a thing, the greater the regret you experienced if you failed to achieve it.
Regret was closely linked to feelings of responsibility. 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.
The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain.
That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars.
People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.
People’s minds coped with loss by drifting onto fantasy paths, where loss never occurred.
Imagination wasn’t a flight with limitless destinations. It was a tool for making sense of a world of infinite possibilities by reducing them.
“The more consequences an event has, the larger the change that is involved in eliminating that event,”
With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try.
In undoing some event, the mind tended to remove whatever felt surprising or unexpected—which was different from saying that it was obeying the rules of probability.
Amos seemed able to walk into any problem, however alien to him, and make the people dealing with it feel as if he grasped its essence better than they did.
“The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can,”
A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.
The brain is limited. There are gaps in our attention. The mind contrives to make those gaps invisible to us.
It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.
