Tversky Quotes & Sayings

Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for. — Amos Tversky

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. — Frederic Bastiat

Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted. — Amos Tversky

My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity. — Amos Tversky

For whoso dies for Christ, he is conqueror and is delivered from all misery and attains the eternal joy to which may it please our Saviour to bring us all. — Jan Hus

Amos believed that people go way out of their way to avoid minor embarrassments and he decided very early on in his life that it was not worth it. — Amos Tversky

It was a summer of great rumblings in the belly of the earth, of atomic flatulence and geopolitical indigestion, consequences of the consumption of sectarian chickpeas by our famished and increasingly incontinent subcontinent. — Mohsin Hamid

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population..."people can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices. — Michael Lewis

I need you to not do that," he said, voice low.
"Why?"
"Because every time you touch me I feel how much you want me and it makes me want you even more."
Her blood heated. "I don't have a problem with that," she murmured.
Bastien groaned — Dianne Duvall

If you eat one another, I don't see why we may not eat you. — Benjamin Franklin

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours — Michael Lewis

They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes--whether it turned out to be right or wrong--but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well. — Michael Lewis

Because the palace walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it. — Marissa Meyer

It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on. — Amos Tversky

The second illusion is historical myopia: the closer an era is to our vantage point in the present, the more details we can make out. Historical myopia can afflict both common sense and professional history. The cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown that people intuitively estimate relative frequency using a shortcut called the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is.10 People, for example, overestimate the likelihoods of the kinds of accidents that make headlines, such as plane crashes, shark attacks, and terrorist bombings, and they underestimate those that pile up unremarked, like electrocutions, falls, and drownings. — Steven Pinker

That's one thing about me, and I think that's what most of my fans enjoy about me, that I don't hold nothing back. I do exactly what I want to do, and say exactly what I want to say. — Lil' Wayne

Well, I think people don't recognise my face because I'm so much older now, but it is astonishing that people can recognise a voice. I do sometimes get recognised, and indeed a lot of people do come and see me. — Tom Baker

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up. — Amos Tversky

Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination. — Michael Lewis

After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds. — Michael Lewis

Try the following experiment. Go to the airport and ask travelers en route to some remote destination how much they would pay for an insurance policy paying, say, a million tugrits (the currency of Mongolia) if they died during the trip (for any reason).Then ask another collection of travelers how much they would pay for insurance that pays the same in the event of death from a terrorist act (and only a terrorist act). Guess which one would command a higher price? Odds are that people would rather pay for the second policy (although the former includes death from terrorism). The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky figured this out several decades ago. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We must learn from history, there is no military solution for the Kashmir issue ... we have to understand this reality. — Pervez Musharraf

unequally; rarely do they assign equal weights to attributes when performing categorization (Goodman, 1955; Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1984; Ortony, 1979; Sutherland & Mackintosh, 1971; Trabasso & Bower, 1968: A. Tversky, 1977). — Lawrence W. Barsalou

I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The psychologists Daniel Kahnerman and Amos Tversky have shown when humans estimate the likelihood or frequency of an event, we make that judgment based not on how often the event has actually occurred, but on how vivid the past examples are. — Benjamin Graham

I've always loved films, and I always felt like a storyteller. I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That's when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do. — Morten Tyldum

Isn't the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk: — Tim Harford

Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. — Martin Luther King Jr.

A second problem is called "anchoring". In a classic study Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman secretly fixed a roulette wheel to land on either 10 or 65. The researchers span the wheel before their subjects, who were then asked to guess the percentage of members of the United Nations that were in Africa. Participants were influenced by irrelevant information: the average guess after a spin of 10 was 25%; for a spin of 65, it was 45%. In meetings, anchoring leads to a first-mover advantage. Discussions will focus on the first suggestions (especially if early speakers benefit from a halo effect, too). Mr Kahneman recommends that to overcome this, every participant should write a brief summary of their position and circulate it prior to the discussion. — Anonymous