Daniel Kahneman Quotes

System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.

Causally, noise is nowhere; statistically, it is everywhere.

The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.

Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.

It is more useful to pay attention to people who disagree with you than to pay attention to those who agree.

Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume reduced the principles of association to three: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. Our concept of association has changed radically since Hume’s days, but his three principles still provide a good start.

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.

wherever there is judgment, there is noise — and more of it than you think.

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.

We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.