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e0cf341
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Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a ..
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reality
perception
eyes
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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aa400ef
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The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most su..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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488beb7
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Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the t..
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probability
statistics
math
luck
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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7f1c192
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We all understand that genius doesn't guarantee success, but it's seductive to assume that success must come from genius.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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cd57b50
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Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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85a5c95
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We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in the society who come out on the bottom.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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f6efd37
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The first step in battling the illusion of control is to be aware of if. But even then it is difficult, once we think we see a pattern, we do not easily let go of our perception.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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24fcdab
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Says Bargh: ,,We all hold dear idea that we're the captain of our own sould, and we're in charge, and it's a very scary feeling when we are not. In fact, that's what psychosis is - the feeling of detachment from reality and that you are not in control, and that's a very frightening feeling for anyone.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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b45f1fd
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People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similiar to our won, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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c38b8bc
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We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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d3e07f5
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For while anyone can sit back and point to the bottom line as justification, assessing instead a person's actual knowledge and actual ability takes confidence, thought, good judgement, and, well, guts. You can't just stand up in a meeting with your colleagues and yell, "Don't fire her. She was just on the wrong end of a Bernoulli series." Nor is it likely to win you friends if you stand up and say of the gloating fellow who just sold more T..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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b0c2264
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As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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6027273
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Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random, there is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events. In fact, inducing people to mistake luck for skills, ..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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1096608
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When we are in the grasp of illusion - or, for that matter, whenever we have a new idea - instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias, and it presents a major impediment of our ability to break free from the misinterpretation of randomness.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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7e9079c
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To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and our unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mea..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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2556cbe
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Dershowitz may have felt justified in misleading the jury because, in his words, "the courtroom oath--'to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth'--is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don't take this oath...indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole truth."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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d68a908
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probability is the very guide of life
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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ab50232
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The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared. --RUTH BENEDICT
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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152f981
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In his theory Perrow recognized that modern systems are made up of thousands of parts, including fallible human decision makers, which interrelate in ways that are, like Laplace's atoms, impossible to track and anticipate individually. Yet one can bet on the fact that just as atoms executing a drunkard's walk will eventually get somewhere, so too will accidents eventually occur. Called normal accident theory, Perrow's doctrine describes how..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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155a5c5
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If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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1e0d923
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the human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.9 However, anyone who has ever taken care of a few children who are all trying to talk to you at once can testify that your conscious mind cannot process anywhere near that amount. The actual amount of information we can handle has been estimated to be somewhere between sixteen and fifty bits per second.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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e354dce
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To understand my doctor's error, let's employ Bayes's method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we'll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We'll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to in..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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1f4c6f4
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there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn't.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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594c545
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You're wasting your time," he said. "You don't learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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aa8097b
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Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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d7c02b5
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The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily ,,The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." into Russian and then back to English. According to the story, it came out: ,,The vodka is str..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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4e92c39
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A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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f3b1563
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Robert Frost wrote in 1914, "Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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1b67de5
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In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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561c91b
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Rosenthal went on to study precisely that - what expectation mean for our children. In one line of research he showed that teachers' expectations greatly affect their students' academic performance, even when the teachers try to treat them impartially. For example, he and a colleague asked schoolkids in eighteen classrooms to complete an IQ test. The teachers, but not students, were given results. The researchers told the teachers that the ..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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4d3fbd4
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The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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9b7af2a
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Paleolithic humans migrated often, and, like my teenagers, they followed the food.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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92aad27
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most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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12ea7c2
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Kant said, there is Das Ding an sich, a thing as it is, and there is Das Ding fur uns, a thing as we know it. For
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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d0f1c64
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In fact, when some wedding guest inevitably complains about the seating arrangements, you might point out how long it would have taken you to consider every possibility: assuming you spent one second considering each one, it would come to more than half a million years. The unhappy guest will assume, of course, that you are being histrionic.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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70867ee
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if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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f002c2e
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A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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2df26eb
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while your unconscious mind is working feverishly to do all those things, you can relax in bed, recognizing, seemingly without effort, the lighting fixture on the ceiling--or the words in this book.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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1700a75
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I wouldn't have to drop out of academia and take a more lucrative position waiting tables at the faculty club.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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deedd2d
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In particular, what seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called "theory of mind," or "ToM," this ability gives humans a remarkable power to make sense of other people's past behavior and to predict how their behavior will unfold given their present or future circumstances."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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048c818
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Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years," and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, "That's exactly what I mean about wasting your time."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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c219b5d
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German authorities saw the need for a statute explicitly forbidding anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine,
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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0f89b48
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If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, "I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives," you'd probably get a pretty strange look;"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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fb851c6
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In 1932, after nineteen years of research, Bartlett published his results.
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Leonard Mlodinow |