Leonard Mlodinow Quotes
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Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal.
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The outline of our lives, like the candles flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate.
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Even random differences in pay lead to the backward inference of differences in skill and hence to the development of unequal influence. It's an element of personal and office dynamics that can't be ignored.
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The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.
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Comets at the time were considered by theologians and the general public alike as a sign of divine anger, and God must have seemed pretty pissed off to create this one - it occupied more than half of the visible sky.
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Historians whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. In fact, in a study of history the illusion of inevitability has serious consequences that it is one of the few things that both conservative and socialist historians can agree on.
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What I have learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.
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The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.
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Random events often come like the raisins in a box of cereal - in groups, streaks, and clusters. And although Fortune is fair in potentialities, she is not fair in outcomes.
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The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large.
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The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense.
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We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom.
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It is one of those contradictions of life that although measurement always carries uncertainty, the uncertainty in measurement is rarely discussed.