Sebastian > Sebastian's Quotes

“Data science takes a natural and intuitive human process—spotting patterns and making sense of them—and injects it with steroids, potentially showing us that the world works in a completely different way from how we thought it did.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

“People are unrealistically optimistic even when the stakes are high. About 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and this is a statistic most people have heard. But around the time of the ceremony, almost all couples believe that there is approximately a zero percent chance that their marriage will end in divorce—even those who have already been divorced!10 (Second marriage, Samuel Johnson once quipped, “is the triumph of hope over experience.”)”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“After all, behavioral economists have spent years demonstrating the clear relationship between making something easy to do and getting people to actually do it. My very good friend and longtime collaborator Richard Thaler puts it this way: “My number-one mantra from Nudge [his book, cowritten with Cass Sunstein, on the application of behavioral economic principles to public policy] is, ‘Make it easy.’ When I say make it easy, what I mean is, if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, ‘Make it easy.’ It’s kind of obvious, but it’s also easy to miss.”7”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive feature of human life; it characterizes most people in most social categories. When they overestimate their personal immunity from harm, people may fail to take sensible preventive steps. If people are running risks because of unrealistic optimism, they might be able to benefit from a nudge. In fact, we have already mentioned one possibility: if people are reminded of a bad event, they may not continue to be so optimistic.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“The Big Data revolution is less about collecting more and more data. It is about collecting the right data.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

“Happy couples are more likely to be happy in the future. Unhappy couples are more likely to be unhappy in the future.”
― Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Loss aversion helps produce inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick with your current holdings.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“we will see, loss aversion operates as a kind of cognitive nudge, pressing us not to make changes, even when”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“The moral is that people are paying less attention to you than you believe.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“In complex situations, the Just Maximize Choices mantra is not enough to create good policy.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“One of the causes of status quo bias is a lack of attention. Many people adopt what we will call the “yeah, whatever” heuristic.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“The difference between the expert’s two estimates illustrates Danny’s distinction between the inside and outside views. When the expert was thinking about the problem as a member of project team, he was locked in the inside view—caught up in the optimism that comes with group endeavors—and did not bother thinking about what psychologists call “base rates,” that is, the average time for similar projects. When he put on his expert hat, thereby taking the outside view, he naturally thought of all the other projects he’d known and made a more accurate guess.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Psychologists tell us that in order to learn from experience, two ingredients are necessary: frequent practice and immediate feedback.”
― Richard H Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics

“The ideal organizational environment encourages everyone to observe, collect data, and speak up.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

“The combination of loss aversion with mindless choosing implies that if an option is designated as the “default,” it will attract a large market share. Default options thus act as powerful nudges.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder