Daniel Kahneman

“In 2023, the two rivals did something nearly extinct in academia. They put all their data together, brought in a neutral referee, and published a joint answer on one of the top journals in the country. The finding? Both were right about different people. For m…”

“People don't remember the totality of the conversation almost ever. They're not going to remember what you said in its entirety. They are going to remember the sharpest moment and the last impression.”

“What this means functionally is that we can shape the end of our experiences to be slightly more enjoyable so that we just remember them more fondly and are more likely to return to the activity at hand.”

“When I talked to Daniel Kahneman about this, he said, you delay intuition by focusing on the separate problems. Take the separate dimensions and really think about each dimension separately and independently. Don't allow people to give the final judgment. Say,…”

“Kahneman got with Killingsworth. They went through all the data, and they basically found that the original paper was, the measure wasn't as precise, and so they were actually measuring unhappiness, and so above 75,000 dollars a year, you can't prevent unhappi…”

“What people really want in their life is they don't seem to care about how happy they'll be. They seem to want to be satisfied with their life. They seem to want to have a good story about their life.”

“The research I did with Angus Deaton at Princeton, famous economist, we showed that in terms of happiness, in terms of emotional tone, positive and negative, Having a lot of money doesn't make you happier, but being poor makes you miserable. So, that's above a…”

“I think changing behavior is extremely difficult. There are a few tips and, you know, a few guidelines about how to do that, but anybody who is very optimistic about changing behavior is just deluded. It's hard to change other people's behavior. It's very hard…”

“Kurt Lewin's insight was that this is not what you should do. You should actually work on the restraining forces and try to make them weaker, and that's a beautiful point, and he showed, he had that image that, you know, I've had since I was an undergraduate, …”

“Behaviors don't necessarily reflect the personality, but behaviors have a lot to do with the situation. And so if people behave in strange ways, look at the situation they're in, and what are the pressures in the situation that make them act as well. So there …”

“And it turns out that you can really expect losers, potential losers, to fight a lot harder than potential winners. And that's the reason that we form so frequently fair, and that when they succeed, they're almost always way more expensive than anticipated, an…”

“I would say that independent, clear thinking is, to a first approximation, impossible. I mean, in the sense that, you know, we believe in things most of the time, not because we have good reasons to believe them. If you ask me for reasons, I'll explain you. I'…”

“If you really want to improve the quality of decision making, use algorithms. I mean, whenever, wherever you can if you can replace judgments by rules and algorithms, they'll do better.”

“That when you are making decisions, you should think of options as if they were candidates. So you should break, break it up into dimensions, evaluate each dimension separately, then look at the profile, and the key is, delay your intuition. Don't try to form …”

“In, in general, you know, if you are the head of a group that makes decisions, one of your missions would be to protect the dissenters, because they're very valuable, and You should make it painless to be sent, or as painless as possible, because it's hard to …”

“We speak of judgment as measurement, but it's measurement where the measuring instrument is your mind, but you do it informally. And because you do it informally, people are going to, are not necessarily going to agree, so wherever we say it's a matter for jud…”

“I'm much more hopeful about organizations, because organizations think more slowly, and they have procedures for thinking, and so you can control the procedures. Individual judgment is really hard to fix. Not impossible.”

“So, when I was teaching negotiations, I would say somebody does that to you, comes up with a number that's absurd. I would say, lose your temper. Make a scene. Say, I will not start the conversation from that number. It's an absurd number. I don't want to. Let…”

“I think it's pretty clear that people prefer leaders who are intuitive and who are overconfident. Leaders who deliberate too much are viewed with suspicion, you know.”

“You would want to say what were the main arguments, pro and con? What were the alternatives that were considered? No, it doesn't have to be very detailed, but it should be enough so that you can come later and debrief yourself.”

“Certainly anything that threatens the leader is not going to be adopted, and leaders may not want something that threatened their subordinates either. People are really very worried about embarrassment.”

“So, we asked the executives the following question. Suppose you take two underwriters at random. By what percentage do they differ? I mean, you look at the difference between the premium, divide that by the average premium. What number do you get? And people e…”

“Priming, and unconscious priming, and so, just hasn't held up in replication, and I believed it, and I wrote it as if it were true, because, you know, the evidence suggested it, and in fact, I thought that you had to accept it, because that was published evide…”

“George Carlin understood psychology. I think better than Daniel Kahneman did. That's a bold statement, but I think that is actually true.”

“What happens is that the simplification really does have a dark side. We're like, oh, what about all the things that people are going to misunderstand? And in particular, the thing that we worry about most is that when you only metabolize one one-liner, then y…”

“And then, you know, what he found was after you've gone through that process, if you then sort of use your intuition after having done that, not before, that then you actually can really drastically improve sort of your hit rate on hiring. And in that case, it…”

“Daniel Kahneman, the great psychologist, he said something one time where he said, the greater, the degree of success, like the higher to the outlier the more standard deviations away from norm that you are of successful, the higher, the more luck played a rol…”

“I have a rule. I never say yes on the phone. I'll have to get back to you tomorrow.”

“Even when you sell to developers, psychology is key to marketing because as Daniel Kahneman says, all decisions are emotional.”

“Emotions get in the way, and I would say that independent clear thinking Is, to first approximation, impossible. I mean, in the sense that, you know, we believe in things most of the time, not because we have good reasons to believe them. If you ask me for rea…”

“If you really want to improve the quality of decision making, use algorithms. I mean, whenever, wherever you can if you can replace judgments by rules and algorithms, they'll do better. Now, there's big social costs to trusting, allowing algorithms to make dec…”

“That when you are making decisions, you should think of options as if they were candidates. So you should break, break it up into dimensions, evaluate each dimension separately, then look at the profile, and the key is, delay your intuition. Don't try to form …”

“And you follow those rules because, as Daniel Kahneman has said, it's easy to follow rules. Even yourself, you follow rules. Other people, if you say it's my rule, they'll just leave you alone.”

“Loss aversion is not wanting to start things for fear of the losses you might incur later. So let's think about loss aversion as something that stops you from starting. Sure loss aversion, as Kahneman says, talks about, is not wanting to turn a loss on paper i…”

“Most of what we learn as humans and animals and in, in the future that machine will learn is learned in this kind of self-supervised manner, basically by watching the world go by and by, you know, taking an action once in a while, but in a, you know, non-task …”

“The example Danny gave on the podcast was sort of, I have a rule that I never agree to anything on the phone, which prevents him from agreeing in the moment for sort of like social approval”

“The thing that Daniel Kahneman taught me about this was nobody argues with rules, but if you're making a decision, people will argue with you.”

“Kahneman directly talks, for example, about earnings forecasts. He says, look, there's a huge amount of work done in earnings forecasts. Nobody can forecast earnings. People keep trying.”

“So, familiar projects, like building another house, or things like that, the overruns are small, by and large. But the more unfamiliar the project is, the bigger the overruns, on average.”

“Happiness is mostly social. It's, you know, it's being with people you love. Who love you back. That's a lot of what happiness is. Life satisfaction is much more conventional. It's to be successful. And, you know, so it's money, education, prestige, that sort …”

“The research I did with Angus Deaton at Princeton, famous economist, we showed that in terms of happiness, in terms of emotional tone, positive and negative, Having a lot of money doesn't make you happier, but being poor makes you miserable. So that's above a …”

“You look at all those people, all those billionaires working their heads off, and they're clearly not doing this because they need more money. They're trying to get more money, and they're trying to get more money because that would be an indication that they'…”

“I think changing behavior is extremely difficult. There are a few tips and, you know, a few guidelines about how to do that, but anybody who is very optimistic about changing behavior is just deluded. It's hard to change other people's behavior. It's very hard…”

“And what we tend to do when we want to move people from A to B is we push them. We add to the driving forces. And Kurt Lewin's insight was that this is not what you should do. You should actually work on the restraining forces and try to make them weaker.”

“Behaviors don't necessarily reflect the personality, but behaviors have a lot to do with the situation.”

“But there is an interesting result that if you have an agent making decisions on somebody's behalf, that agent doesn't have loss of urge. So that agent sells and buys at the same price, which is the economically rational thing to do.”

“And it turns out that you can really expect losers, potential losers, to fight a lot harder than potential winners. And that's the reason that reforms so frequently fail, and that when they succeed, they're almost always way more expensive than anticipated, an…”

“We believe in things most of the time, not because we have good reasons to believe them. If you ask me for reasons, I'll explain you. I'll always find a reason, but the reasons are not the causes of our beliefs. We have beliefs because mostly we believe in som…”

“That's how I believe in climate change, you know. I believe in the people who tell me there is climate change, and the people who don't believe in climate change, they believe in other people”

“If you really want to improve the quality of decision making, use algorithms. I mean, whenever, wherever you can if you can replace judgments by rules and algorithms, they'll do better.”

“That when you are making decisions, you should think of options as if they were candidates. So you should break, break it up into dimensions, evaluate each dimension separately, then look at the profile, and the key is, delay your intuition. Don't try to form …”

“Very quickly you form an impression, and then you spend most of your time confirming it, instead of collecting evidence. And so, if accidentally your impression was in the wrong direction, you're going to confirm it, and you don't give yourself a chance to cor…”

“In, in general, you know, if you are, if you're the head of a group that makes decisions, one of your missions would be to protect the dissenters. Because they're very valuable, and you should make it painless to dissent, or as painless as possible, because it…”

“So it's harder to recognize very good judgment, but it's fairly easy to see, you know, what goes wrong, and there are quite a few ways for judgment to go wrong.”

“Yeah, certainly not much better, no.”

“So in general, you know, more educated people make better judgments, I think, on average, but people decide I'm going to make better judgments. I don't think that's very hopeful. I'm much more hopeful about organizations, because organizations think more slowl…”

“And the premortem legitimizes that sort of dissent and that sort of doubt. Not only legitimizes it, you know, it rewards it. And so that's a very good idea. I don't, you know, I don't think that it's going to prevent people from making mistakes, big mistakes, …”

“When you're going to be discussing a topic, and it's known in advance, and people have been sent some material to think about the topic, that you may want them to write down their decision, the decision they are in favor of, before the discussion starts. That …”

“I would advise people who make a lot of decisions to keep track. Their decisions and of how they turned out. So that later you can come and evaluate your procedures and see whether there is anything that is in common with those decisions that turned out well a…”

“When I suggested that, never went anywhere.”