Daniel Kahneman on …
- Kahneman On… Logic and Rationality: “Irrational has no meaning for me. Being illogical is normal, it’s human. Being logical would be… Spock. To some extent it’s not even interesting to ask the question whether people are logical or not.”
- Kahneman On… What We Believe In: “We have a sense that we see reality the way it is. We believe that we believe what we believe, because we believe the arguments that come to our mind when we defend it, which is completely the wrong way round. The truth is that you believe in the arguments because they support [your] beliefs. And the origin of the belief comes from your past somewhere, from people or organizations that you trust.”
- Kahneman on… Bias & Noise: “The measure of global error is the square of bias plus the square of noise. Bias and noise are two separate families of error. They’re equally important in principle and you can improve accuracy – without touching bias at all – by reducing noise. This is non-intuitive but yet it’s true.”
- Kahneman On… Getting Trapped in a Local Equilibrium:“Some randomness is needed for creativity, provided that you have the opportunity to get feedback and to see what works – evolution requires some randomness and variability.”
- Kahneman On… Decision Hygiene: “When you are evaluating a prospect or an investment, you can break the problem up into dimensions instead of looking at it globally. Evaluate each dimension separately and objectively and independently. Inhibit any attempt to form a global impression. The real deep principle of hygiene here is ‘delay intuition and delay agreement.’ Intuition if you delay it is truly wonderful, but you have to delay it. If you allow intuition to jump to conclusions, you’ll be noisy.”
- Kahneman On… Suffering: “The way of measuring suffering in an individual [is measuring] how much time you spend in a state you would wish to avoid. It’s a simple definition really. Suffering is very unevenly distributed – 10% of the people do about half of the suffering.”
- Kahneman On… The Crowd Within: “If you pool yourself more than once then you’ll come up with somewhat different judgments and the average of your judgments is likely to be more accurate than any single judgment.”
- Kahneman On… The Future: “Asking me what I’m optimistic about is a non-starter. Asking me what I’m worried about – there’s a long list. The most immediate is populism, the more remote is climate change, even more remote is what AI may do to us. But in the meantime, we’re fumbling along.”