Samvit > Samvit's Quotes

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology

“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical
exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the
same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course
of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of
skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.”
― Kahneman

“In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”
― Daniel Kahneman

“The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance. No story of Google’s unlikely success will meet that test, because no story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome. The human mind does not deal well with nonevents.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Many researchers have sought the secret of successful education by identifying the most successful schools in the hope of discovering what distinguishes them from others. One of the conclusions of this research is that the most successful schools, on average, are small. In a survey of 1,662 schools in Pennsylvania, for instance, 6 of the top 50 were small, which is an overrepresentation by a factor of 4. These data encouraged the Gates Foundation to make a substantial investment in the creation of small schools, sometimes by splitting large schools into smaller units. At least half a dozen other prominent institutions, such as the Annenberg Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust, joined the effort, as did the U.S. Department of Education’s Smaller Learning Communities Program. This probably makes intuitive sense to you. It is easy to construct a causal story that explains how small schools are able to provide superior education and thus produce high-achieving scholars by giving them more personal attention and encouragement than they could get in larger schools. Unfortunately, the causal analysis is pointless because the facts are wrong. If the statisticians who reported to the Gates Foundation had asked about the characteristics of the worst schools, they would have found that bad schools also tend to be smaller than average. The truth is that small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable. If anything, say Wainer and Zwerling, large schools tend to produce better results, especially in higher grades where a variety of curricular options is valuable. Thanks to recent advances in cognitive psychology,”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow