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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 25b38d1 | If, in other religions, we pray to God, only in Christianity does God himself pray, that is to say, address an external unfathomable authority. | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| 86e751f | And now if they should break or you should fall, you might faint for a year or two. If that happens, your local system takes over: that's the pack on your back. | Cordwainer Smith | ||
| a03944f | Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter. | David McRaney | ||
| c5464e4 | You are biased to overestimate the emotional impact of future events. | David McRaney | ||
| 1e032e5 | In 1970, psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley created an experiment in which they would drop pencils or coins. Sometimes they would be in a group, sometimes with one other person. They did this six thousand times. The results? They got help 20 percent of the time in a group, 40 percent of the time with one other person. They decided to up the stakes, and in their next experiment they had someone fill out a questionnaire. After a few mi.. | David McRaney | ||
| 1d4a89a | Subjective optimization complements sour grapes, the inclination to see that which you can't have as that which you didn't want in the first place. Subjective optimization makes whatever you get stuck with seem better than that which you can no longer obtain. Metaphorically, it is the process that makes lemons into lemonade. | David McRaney | ||
| ba7acfc | It is not a fallacy to trust the consensus of thousands of researchers on how to interpret the evidence provided by decades of studies. | David McRaney | ||
| e318d37 | If you look to the downtrodden and wonder why they can't pull themselves out of poverty and get a nice job like you, you are committing the just-world fallacy. You are ignoring the unearned blessings of your station. | David McRaney | ||
| c8959c7 | This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect. | David McRaney | ||
| 05b3048 | Men are easy to manipulate thanks to having fewer metrics by which they judge potential mates, and thus advertising has long been preying on their tendencies. Women will buy products in an attempt to become the impossible goal. Men will buy products in an attempt to mate with the impossible goal. Sexy and sexist advertising can kill two birds with one stone. | David McRaney | ||
| 6619282 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You calculate what is risky or rewarding and always choose to maximize gains while minimizing losses. THE TRUTH: You depend on emotions to tell you if something is good or bad, greatly overestimate rewards, and tend to stick to your first impressions. | David McRaney | ||
| 0f91c25 | THE MISCONCEPTION: After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong. THE TRUTH: You often look back on the things you've just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along. | David McRaney | ||
| 47dd5a5 | To be less dumb is to see the danger in believing in forces that do not exist and trusting them when you would do better to trust yourself. | David McRaney | ||
| 0877bae | If you hear a] story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. | food sausage | David McRaney | |
| 4d9814f | If three men couldn't see eye to eye on who among them was and was not the real Jesus, your chances of swaying someone on the Internet to trade in his belief system concerning religion, art, wedge issues, politics, or literally anything else at all are pretty grim. Personal narratives and private mythologies don't flip in an instant; they don't trade places in a single argument. If minds change at all, they change slowly. | David McRaney | ||
| e0f2efe | You see people who speak slowly as being less intelligent--slow. | David McRaney | ||
| f647d95 | Behaviors create attitudes. | David McRaney | ||
| 43852dc | Jokes and movies, comic books and professional wrestling, television shows and news programs--they all present dramatic interpretations of facts and fiction in the format of a narrative for the same reason we put chairs in cars. | David McRaney | ||
| aa14a86 | THE MISCONCEPTION: Problems are easier to solve when a group of people get together to discuss solutions. THE TRUTH: The desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress. | David McRaney | ||
| 72c6af5 | Where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of obectivity....about 20 percent of all people live in that spot and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism. ...you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. | David McRaney | ||
| 7fbde56 | Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren't trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recogni.. | David McRaney | ||
| abb65e2 | Brand loyalty--that nebulous emotional connection people have with certain companies, which turns them into defenders and advocates for corporations who don't give a shit. | David McRaney | ||
| 0057192 | Research shows people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren't. You think everyone noticed when you stumbled in your speech, but they didn't. Well, unless you drew attention to it by over-apologizing. | David McRaney | ||
| 1ccadce | Visiting friends just to shoot the shit is the human equivalent of picking ticks off of one another's backs. | David McRaney | ||
| 479a520 | In the end, Alter and Forgas concluded the happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life and your own abilities. Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves. | David McRaney | ||
| 3b70dad | THE MISCONCEPTION: You are one person, and your happiness is based on being content with your life. THE TRUTH: You are multiple selves, and happiness is based on satisfying all of them. | David McRaney | ||
| e8d49cf | thanks to a plethora of cognitive biases, faulty heuristics, and common fallacies of thought, you are probably deluding yourself minute by minute just to cope with reality. | David McRaney | ||
| f0f871e | THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are around others, you feel as if everyone is noticing every aspect of your appearance and behavior. THE TRUTH: People devote little attention to you unless prompted to. | David McRaney | ||
| 2d1abe1 | You can see the proof in an MRI scan of someone presented with political opinions that conflict with her own. The brain scans of a person shown statements that oppose her political stance show that the highest areas of the cortex, the portions responsible for providing rational thought, get less blood until another statement is presented that confirms her beliefs. Your brain literally begins to shut down when you feel your ideology is threa.. | David McRaney | ||
| 31cbf95 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You believe your opinions and decisions are based on experience and facts, while those who disagree with you are falling for the lies and propaganda of sources you don't trust. THE TRUTH: Everyone believes the people they disagree with are gullible, and everyone thinks they are far less susceptible to persuasion than they truly are. | David McRaney | ||
| 3da2e5a | You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is. | David McRaney | ||
| cad9ae0 | Every day you feel like you can't control the forces affecting your fate-your job,the government,your addiction,your depression,your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customise your ringtone,you paint your room,you collect stamps. You choose. Choices,even small ones,can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavoir and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to.. | inspirational | David McRaney | |
| 9fb7120 | Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined na.. | David McRaney | ||
| 896a43e | Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things . . . well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds .. | David McRaney | ||
| c016098 | researchers concluded most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, assuming their thoughts can influence things outside of their control. | David McRaney | ||
| 790d2b9 | You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn't you are a bad manager of your time--you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain. | David McRaney | ||
| 5da2e0b | His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality. | John le Carré | ||
| 0311b09 | the striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating. | John le Carré | ||
| 9c81f57 | By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and s.. | education jesuits | John le Carré | |
| 53cf4d1 | It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, "half a million liquidated is a statistic, but one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy." He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation - or the elimination, Leamas - of a few individuals. It is all on.. | John le Carré | ||
| d9e3773 | His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were. | John le Carré | ||
| e953c31 | Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe, the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the end and the means were identical. | ideology intelligence spy | John le Carré | |
| adfb99b | They had brought him in during the war, the professional civil servant from an orthodox department, a man to handle paper and integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machine of bureaucracy. It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them. And he did it so well. They liked his diffidence when he apologized for the company he kept,.. | John le Carré | ||
| 1ebb7e4 | For Heaven's sake, Adrian, do you think Intelligence consists of unassailable philosophical truths? Does every priest have to prove that Christ was born on Christmas Day? | John le Carré |