Laziness is built deep into our nature.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.