Daniel Levitin Quotes

Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

All models have faults - that doesn't mean you can't use them as tools for making decisions.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

I have an intuition, and usually my intuition is right. I have a feeling for whether a role will be good or bad for me, and I almost never make a mistake.

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

It's hard when you have a lot of naysayers to know when they might be right or when to ignore them and go with your gut and do something that may seem risky.

Every moment in life can be interpreted as a risk, depending on our outlook - and level of obsessive- compulsive disorder! I do my best to depend on my gut. If you sit with a decision long enough, your gut/soul will tell you what path to take.

When it comes to assessing the chances of some complicated combination of events, gut feelings are pretty much useless.

Foreseeing the future is always difficult.

It's very personal to me and doesn't work for everybody, but what I have found in my experience is that when I make pro and con lists, it's usually because I am trying to talk myself out of a good idea or talk myself into a really bad one.

I've said many times that I'm not one of those people who check statistics, follows history, and says, 'If I do this, what will happen.'

And your brain doesn't naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. "for example," people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that's a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

Most of the time you should use reason, there is no doubt about that because gut often makes us susceptible to lots of different biases, particularly if what you're deciding is something that you really, that expertise can be brought to bear on it, there is a way in which you can align the odds, so then you should really use reason.

Often you have to rely on intuition.

Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is - at the final hour - horse dookey. You can only try out.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

I never think of things rationally or intellectually. I swear, every single decision I make is just instinct and my instincts tend to be accurate.

If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it. That's what people generally assume. But actually, the way you think determines the way you're going to do things. Then you don't notice a result comes back, or you don't see it as a result of what you've done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking. Is that clear?

I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where we can say this is the template, this is the checklist, that must be met [for intervention].

A friend told me to listen to my heart. Another friend told me to listen to my gut. Maybe I need an autopsy, because right now my colon is kind of iffy.