Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
We all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
…the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.
The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.
The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
Many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.
Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.
There’s a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.
The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.
However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.
The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.
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.
Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.
When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.
I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.
Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.
By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.
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.
It’s a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.
If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.
We don’t see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.