Thoughts
I read this book through a book club that I joined at my work. It took us, a core group of four people, a couple of years to read, but it was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done. We discussed many things outside of the book - team, role, life changes that each us went through.
I was underlining a lot of things on the physical book. I need to read again and take some notes.
Notes
PART I. TWO SYSTEMS
The characters of the story
Attention and effort
The lazy controller
The associative machine
Cognitive ease
Norms, surprises, and causes
A machine for jumping to conclusions
How judgments happen
Answering an easier question.
PART II. HEURISTICS AND BIASES
The law of small numbers
Anchors
The science of availability
Availability, emotion, and risk
Tom W’s specialty
Linda : less is more
Causes trump statistics
Regression to the mean
Taming intuitive predictions.
PART III. OVERCONFIDENCE
The illusion of understanding
The illusion of validity
Intuitions vs. formulas
Expert intuition : when can we trust it?
The outside view
The engine of capitalism.
PART IV. CHOICES
Bernoulli’s errors
Prospect theory
The endowment effect
Bad events
The fourfold pattern
Rare events
Risk policies
Keeping score
Reversals
Frames and reality.
PART V. TWO SELVES
Two selves
Life as a story
Experienced well-being
Thinking about life.
Quotes
“A happy mood loosens the control of caution and analysis over our performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative, but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”
“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.””We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
“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.”
“Before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”
“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
“Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality–but it is not what people and organizations want.”
“The idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. 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.”
“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
“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.”
“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”
“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.”
“I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.”
“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
“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.”
“Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.”
“we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
“You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”
“Familiarity breeds liking.”
“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
“The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”
“The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.” ,
“acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.” ,
“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. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common” ,
“We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.”
“We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”
“Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”
“The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”