“The trouble, Danny suspected, was that “the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don’t communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something on somebody’s mind.”
― The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
― The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
“The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain. That is, when it was like most gambles in life. To get most people to flip a coin for a hundred bucks, you had to offer them far better than even odds. If they were going to lose $100 if the coin landed on heads, they would need to win $200 if it landed on tails. To get them to flip a coin for ten thousand bucks, you had to offer them even better odds than you offered them for flipping it for a hundred. “The greater sensitivity to negative rather than positive changes is not specific to monetary outcomes,” wrote Amos and Danny. “It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.” It wasn’t hard to imagine why this might be—a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival. “Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle,” they wrote.”
― The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
― The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.”
― The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
― The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
“Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.”
― Ego Is the Enemy
― Ego Is the Enemy
“At the heart of sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worth of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.”
― The Course of Love
― The Course of Love
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