Daniel Kahneman

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.

We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.