Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn’t mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

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

An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.