Michael Perkins's Reviews > Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed. In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. 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. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow