Daniel Kahneman Quotes

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’

Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.

People sometimes see an image and without knowing the surrounding patterns draw false conclusions.

[Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.

If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil. A juster philosophy might teach me rather to think that my eyes deceived me, and that the offer was not really what I conceived it to be.

I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we "see" may be different than what is actually in front of us.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong.

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

Once one pays some attention to something, then you begin to see evidence of it everywhere.

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.

The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

I only use statistics to reinforce what I already think, or if it's something unusual.

Science values static patterns.

But to measure cause and effect... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies?

I love humans; always seeing patterns in things that aren’t there.