Amos Tversky > Quotes

“It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on.”
― Amos Tversky

“Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.”
― Amos Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.”
― Amos Tversky

“Amos believed that people go way out of their way to avoid minor embarrassments and he decided very early on in his life that it was not worth it.”
― Amos Tversky

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
― Amos Tversky

“He who sees the past as surprise free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”
― Amos Tversky

“[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”
― Amos Tversky

“People pay an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment”
― Amos Tversky

“Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle”
― Amos Tversky

“For all we know, the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink invisible?”
― Amos Tversky