Rudolph A. Marcus Quotes

Don't avoid doing something wondering what its consequences may be. Give it a thought, break it down, and consider what really may happen rather than not do it at all.

Do we really want to continue to push out the envelope of survival only to see other things crop up that we may not like?

In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a 'should' involved, and this cannot be worked out from, 'If I do this, what will happen?' alone.

The systematic experimental study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

We should not be making near-term decisions with long-term consequences without robustly debating these questions and fully considering the substantial and unpredictable risks of these actions.

You take unacceptable risk, you have to be prepared to face the consequence.

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.

We tend to ignore the high probability of small gains or losses and focus on big payoffs or disaster despite remote odds.

If individuals have no sufficient reason to believe that a good situation today will have adverse long-term consequences, it must always be rational for them to aim to maximize their short-term good.

When a government faces an evil that might be avoided, the usual pattern is to first debate whether or not the evil is real or imagined; then determine how evil it really is; then is it an appropriate function of government to avoid it? Then what are the alternative ways to avoid it? Then what are the costs to avoid it? And finally, is the benefit of avoiding the evil worth the cost? In those cases where it is, it is by this time too late to avoid the evil and discussions shift to ameliorating the evil.

I think that we have to be constantly asking ourselves, 'How do we calculate the risk?' And sometimes we don't calculate it correctly; we either overstate it or understate it.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn't happen. If that's the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

Managers can make themselves look strong by selling or dropping players, but if the move doesn't work, the choice looks flawed.

Every decision you make has a consequence.

The ability to calibrate risk doesn't happen rationally.

Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.

When an opportunity comes knocking, you don't necessarily have to open your door. But you owe it to yourself to at least look through the keyhole.

To make a good decision, you actually need to think about it, the contours and the consequences.

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.

The hardest thing to judge is what level of risk is safe.

Choices are easy when you have nothing to lose.

I'm not insane, sir. I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.

Do nothing without regard to the consequences.

Risks I think are the thing that make life important and everything that you and I do is risk vs. benefit. Is there a risk to sending your kid out? Absolutely. Is there a benefit? It exceeds the risk.