Daniel Kahneman Quotes

It's irrational to assume you can ever truly evaluate yourself as a good or bad human being. You will never have enough information.That "bad person" at work who torments you might be an excellent father to his kids. That other "bad person" at work who screwed up royally today? That error might later lead to a huge breakthrough. We will never have enough info to holistically evaluate a person and score them in totality as "bad" or "good."

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.

I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.

Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.

There are a lot of parallels between being a mutual fund manager and being a general manager. Both in the financial markets and in baseball, we're dealing with a world where uncertainty reigns. We're trying to predict the future performance of human beings. It's a fundamental difficulty for which we both have to account.

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn't mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.

In the great majority of cases we simply do not know enough about the industry or company to come to sensible judgments-in that situation we pass.

Decisions are the endless uncertainties of life that we'll not know if they're right until the very end, so do the best you can and hope its right.

The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

You make some big grandoise decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself.

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.

My ability to keep cool in a crisis is based entirely on not knowing all the facts.

We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.

Forecasting is very difficult, especially when it involves the future.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.

The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

My interest in acting was overwhelming, but I wasn't thinking, "I'm going to California and I'm going to become a movie star." Things were different then. I lived just for the moment, and whatever happened, happened.

Forecasts usually tell us more of the forecaster than of the forecast.

Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.