23
" It’s powerful advice. How often do we go off on someone for making a decision that we, personally, wouldn’t have made, calling them an idiot, fuming, getting angry? How much time and emotional energy we’d save if we simply learned to ask ourselves why they acted as they did, rather than judge, make presumptions, and react. "
― Maria Konnikova , The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
29
" You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) "
― Maria Konnikova , The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
33
" Hay un proverbio budista. Un granjero pierde su valioso caballo. Su vecino va a visitarlo para compadecerse por su mala suerte, pero el granjero se encoge de hombros: quién sabe si perderlo ha sido mala suerte o no. Al día siguiente, el caballo regresa. Con él vienen doce caballos salvajes. El vecino le felicita por la excelente noticia, pero el granjero se encoge de hombros. Poco después, el hijo del granjero se cae de uno de esos caballos salvajes mientras lo está adiestrando. Se rompe una pierna. El vecino le transmite sus condolencias. El granjero se encoge de hombros. Quién sabe. El país se declara en guerra y el ejército acude al pueblo para reclutar a todos los jóvenes disponibles. El hijo del granjero queda exento debido a su pierna rota. Qué maravilla, dice el vecino. Y, de nuevo, el granjero se encoge de hombros. Quizá. "
― Maria Konnikova , The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
36
" Von Neumann did not care for most card games. They were, he thought, as boring as the people who wasted their lives playing them, trying to coax mastery—impossibly—out of pure chance. Games of pure chance, though, were to his mind not much worse than those at the opposite end: games like chess, where all the information could theoretically be gleaned, where every move could be mathematically accounted for in advance. There was one exception to his distrust of gaming: poker. He loved it. To him, it represented that ineffable balance between skill and chance that governs life—enough skill to make playing worthwhile, enough chance that the challenge was there for the taking. "
― Maria Konnikova , The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
39
" And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made‑up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition. "
― Maria Konnikova , The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
