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41 " Emotional learning may be quick, but what we consider as “expertise” usually takes a long time to develop. "
― Daniel Kahneman , Thinking, Fast and Slow
42 " Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. "
43 " If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. "
44 " Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. "
45 " 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. "
46 " A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physicalexertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving thesame goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding courseof action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition ofskill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature. "
47 " 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. "
48 " We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. "
49 " we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. "
50 " I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers. "
51 " A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. "
52 " You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general. "
53 " Familiarity breeds liking. "
54 " The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future. "
55 " Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. "
56 " acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions. "
57 " People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common "
58 " 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. "
59 " 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. "
60 " The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition. "
