"People predict by making up stories. People predict very little and explain everything. People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not. People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough. People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts. The handwriting was on the wall. It was just the ink that was invisible. People often work hard to obtain information they already have and avoid new knowledge. Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe. In this match, surprises are expected. Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable. A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."
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MacArthur FellowsPeople from HaifaAcademics from IsraelEconomists from IsraelPsychologists from Israel
Original Language: English
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Notes made by Tversky for a scientific paper, c.1972. Michael Lewis. "The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World". Penguin, 2016 (ISBN 9780141983035).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Amos_Tversky
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Amos Tversky
Amos Nathan Tversky (March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk.
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