To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.

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 confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

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.

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

People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.