... sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question.

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

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 illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.

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

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.