I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.

We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large.

you know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.