I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.
We’re generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.
By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.
Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.
The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time.
People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.
It’s nonsense to say money doesn’t buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.
When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.
If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.
An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.
An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can’t easily recognize that they are the same.
Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.
Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.
The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than your own.
I don’t try to be clever at all. The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion.
Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.
You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts.
Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.
In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you’ll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.