Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.
An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality – but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.
Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings.
Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it.
The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly.
We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” Tetlock writes. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals – distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on – are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” The.
Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to racing motorcycles – and.
For example, the question “Do you now feel a slight numbness in your left leg?” always prompts quite a few people to report that their left leg does indeed feel a little strange.
Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring.
This set of choices has a lot to tell us about the limits of human rationality. For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is – a hopeless mirage.
You just like winning and dislike losing – and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning.
It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.
The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.
The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.
The effects of high optimism on decision making are, at best, a mixed blessing, but the contribution of optimism to good implementation is certainly positive. The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks.
You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The.
To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.
Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck.
Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.