Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

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."

My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

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.

Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.

If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.