Tversky Quotes

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes--whether it turned out to be right or wrong--but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population..."people can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds