Cognitive Bias Quotes

“It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most.”
― Penn Jillette

“Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.”
― William James

“A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Aurora looked upon a city divided by human perception.

A civil war was ongoing: between those for whom the real world had primacy and those who had chosen Truesight as their truth. To escape the existential horror of their impending finality, people had donned their orange-tinted Veravisum Virtual Visors and locked their fears behind a separate reality. A hyperreality found at odds with everyday life.

The result was a war of visions: between truth and falsehood, between regular people and the VVV’ed. Each party claimed to see reality for what it truly was and more often than not, both parties were right.”
― Louise Blackwick, 5 Stars

“The VVV Visors had the weird knack of twisting your worldview: the more you looked at the world through their tangerine lenses, the more reality distorted and shifted to fit your new point of view.

This made Veravisum Virtual Visors incredibly unreliable, given their proclivity to redact your reality, confirm your private opinions and magnify your cognitive bias.”
― Louise Blackwick, 5 Stars

“Each of your brains creates its own myth about the universe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Autobiography of God: Biopsy of A Cognitive Reality

“Do you believe in UFOs?’ I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Characteristics of System 1:
• generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions
• operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control
• can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search)
• executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training
• creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory
• links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
• distinguishes the surprising from the normal
• infers and invents causes and intentions
• neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt
• is biased to believe and confirm
• exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)
• focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)
• generates a limited set of basic assessments
• represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate
• matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness)
• computes more than intended (mental shotgun)
• sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)
• is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)*
• overweights low probabilities*
• shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)*
• responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)*
• frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The cognitive point here is that we generally make sense of confusing things by judging them against various preconceptions. When confronted with a new proposition we don’t start thinking about it with a blank sheet in front of us; instead, we place the proposition somewhere in relation to our pre-existing structure of beliefs and attitudes, this makes liked much easier, because we can reduce even a complicated judgement to a simple binary one – does it conform to my existing views or not?”
― Evan Davis

“[...] I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them.”
― Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe

“Consider the following fact. Sweden accounts for approximately 1 percent of the world economy. A rational investor in the United States or Japan would invest about 1 percent of his assets in Swedish stocks. Can it make sense for Swedish investors to invest 48 times more? No. [T]his reflects the well-known tendency of investors to buy stocks from their home country, something that economists refer to as the home bias.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

“The anatomy of the human mind is reportedly responsible for how our conscious and unconscious mind is organized. The physiological contours of the human mind are responsible for interpreting and comprehending the physical world that surrounds us employing our five basic senses as its datum antennas. The gears of the human mind work to classify our perceptions into five basic orders: animals, plants, tools, natural objects, and people. How a person’s brain perceives the tangible world and interprets ongoing interactions with its functional apparatus becomes the operating representation of each person’s physical reality. People rely upon their physical reality to make life-altering decisions.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We are all fundamentally racist.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“At the end of the day, we're a bunch of apes whose brains were optimized for defending ourselves and our tribes, not for doing unbiased evaluations of scientific evidence. So why get angry at humanity for not being great at something we didn't evolve to be great at? Wouldn't it make more sense to appreciate the ways in which we do transcend our genetic legacy?”
― Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

“Terminalizing phenomena gives the illusion of knowledge.”
― Sayem Sarkar