Amos Tversky Quotes

Israel, Psychologist
March 16, 1937 – June, 2, 1996.

Amos Nathan Tversky was a cognitive and mathematical psychologist, a student of cognitive science, a collaborator of Daniel Kahneman, and a figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk.

“Metaphors replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”

Amos Tversky
My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity.

Amos Tversky

“For all we know, the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink invisible?”

Amos Tversky
Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.

Amos Tversky
- Problem
- Error
- Laymen
“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.”

Amos Tversky
- Live
- Worry
- Pessimist
It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on.

Amos Tversky
- People
- Think
- Run
Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.

Amos Tversky
“He who sees the past as surprise free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

Amos Tversky
- Future
- Past
- Surprises

“Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle”

Amos Tversky
- Pain
- Battle
- Species