450 Quotes by Daniel Kahneman

We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.

We have in our head a remarkably powerful computer, not vast by conventional hardware standards, but able to represent the structure of our world by various types of associative links in a vast network of various types of ideas.

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential.

...flow - a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle; interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations.

Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costles is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is no scientifically defensible.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

When something cement does not fit into the current context of activated ideas, the system detects an abnormality, as you just experienced. You had no particular idea of what was coming after something, but you knew when the word cement came that it was abnormal in that sentence. Studies of brain responses have shown that violations of normality are detected with astonishing speed and subtlety.

A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.