Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.

We deeply want to be led by people who know what they're doing and who don't have to think about it too much.

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.

One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.

One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

We were required to predict a soldier's performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is." We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual's future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like "He will be a star."

The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.