Daniel Kahneman Quotes

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

higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.

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

Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.

"If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility."

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant cognitive bias. Because optimistic bias is both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.

A rare event will be overweighted if it specifically attracts attention. [...] And when there is no overweighting, there will be neglect.

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

It took Francis Galton several years to figure out that and regression are not two concepts – they are different perspectives on the same concept. The general rule is straightforward but has surprising consequences: whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean.

The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.

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.

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

Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo

The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.