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.
Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It’s highly fallible, and we should know that.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Endlessly amused by people’s minds.
We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.
Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.
The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.
Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.