John

“If you think about it, that is surprising, since – these days at least – a bank is in essence nothing more than a lot of people and a collection of legal contracts represented on some very complex computer systems. Put simplistically, banks are just people and computers; all the rest is nice to have but not essential. If that statement surprises you, consider this: virtually all the money you get paid, save or spend is not physical in any sense whatsoever but is merely an abstract representation in ones and zeros on some bank’s computer system somewhere.”
― Kevin Rodgers, Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis

“He’s one of the best storytellers in the history of Nike. My favorite, naturally, is the one about the day we went public. He sat his parents down and told them the news. “What does that mean?” they whispered. “It means your original eight-thousand-dollar loan to Phil is worth $1.6 million.” They looked at each other, looked at Woodell. “I don’t understand,” his mother said. If you can’t trust the company your son works for, who can you trust?”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“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 is, when it was like most gambles in life. To get most people to flip a coin for a hundred bucks, you had to offer them far better than even odds. If they were going to lose $100 if the coin landed on heads, they would need to win $200 if it landed on tails. To get them to flip a coin for ten thousand bucks, you had to offer them even better odds than you offered them for flipping it for a hundred. “The greater sensitivity to negative rather than positive changes is not specific to monetary outcomes,” wrote Amos and Danny. “It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.” It wasn’t hard to imagine why this might be—a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival. “Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle,” they wrote.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis,” said Danny. “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” As Danny and Lanir wrote, decades later, after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency asked them to describe their experience in decision analysis, the Israeli Foreign Ministry was “indifferent to the specific probabilities.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds