People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.

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.

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

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

I don't try to be clever at all. The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion.

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."

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.