Alafair Burke Quotes

How easy it is to think well of ourselves. Until the moment is upon us, we can never be certain.

We all have our little illusions about our own mental abilities.

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

Every audition that I walk out of where I think I nailed it, I never get that job, ever.

I.Q. deficiency. There are some people who are an order of fries short of a Happy Meal, and what is often a characteristic about every one of these people is that they don't know it. They have no idea how incompetent or stupid they are. It's the exact opposite. They have the loftiest, highest self-image.

Growing up in the Boroughs, I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school.

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

It's hard to avoid 'unconscious overclaiming.' In unconscious overclaiming, we unconsciously overestimate our contributions relative to others. This makes sense, because we're far more aware of what we do than what other people do. Also, we tend to do the work that we value.

Every Body has so good an Opinion of their own Understanding as to think their own way the best.

For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average. People at the bottom still think they're outperforming other people.

We misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it's an illusory sense of control.

Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.

Most of us think that we are 'better than average' in most things. We are also 'miscalibrated,' meaning that our sense of the probability of events doesn't line up with reality. When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time.

I don't really think of myself as stupid - but then, who does?

There is a long history of research showing that people are overconfident about their abilities. But it turns out that people in general are not overconfident about their abilities; people with a fixed mindset are overconfident.

The very thing that men think they have got the most of, they have got the least of; and that is judgment.

Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are-- and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.

Whom drink made wits, though nature made them fools.

I can always tell how stupid someone is by how certain they are about what they're saying.

The more secure we feel against our liability to any error to which, in fact, we are liable, the greater must be our danger of falling into it.

Every kid thinks they have something special about themselves. Every adult thinks they have a big idea at some point in their life. Rather than pursue every thing they possibly can to prepare themselves to enable their idea or special talent, they tend to wing it and make excuses.

People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.

It's not what you know, it's what you think you know.