{"author":"Michael Lewis","author_id":"Michael+Lewis","total_quotes":46,"quotes":[{"text":"You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That's when you need to stop and check your thinking...Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, 'He's just drunk,' and you'll miss the subdural hematoma.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["bias","decision-making","pattern-recognition","redelmeier","thinking"],"id":5369,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"I hated discussing ideas with investors,' he said, 'because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.' Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["debate","discussion","ideas"],"id":11087,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["aging","baseball","moneyball"],"id":27280,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["chernobyl","humorous","investment","wall-street"],"id":42004,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["bias","decision-making","kahneman","recency-bias","thinking","tversky"],"id":72790,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. 'The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["choice"],"id":84380,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["behavior","complain","illusions"],"id":102834,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. 'I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'' he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? 'If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["fallibility","humility","morey","uncertainty"],"id":112876,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"A lot of what people did and said when they 'predicted' things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, 'It's impossible to know for sure'.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["thinking","uncertainty"],"id":118635,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"},{"text":"The way it feels to me,' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.","author":"Michael Lewis","tags":["earth","ideas","think"],"id":123453,"author_id":"Michael+Lewis"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":46,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}