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The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Daniel Kahneman

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Daniel Kahneman
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: March 5
Economist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Tel Aviv
Israel
D Kahneman
Understand
Past
Fosters
Predict
Illusion
Ability
Future

More quotes by Daniel Kahneman

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... sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question.
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When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.
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The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.
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The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.
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When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.
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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.
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People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.
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Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.
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An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.
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We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.
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It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.
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My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.
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We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.
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Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
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After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
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Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.
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Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.
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If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.
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There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.
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People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.
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