D P > D's Quotes

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
― 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

“we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”
― 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

“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

“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.”
― 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

“People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are all born selfish.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, ‘for the good of the mammals’?”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“It was harder to work out that there was a question than to think of the answer.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined