Your own biases

Their wordsThe elementary part of psychology—the psychology of misjudgment, as I call it—is a terribly important thing to learn. There are about 20 little principles. And they interact, so it gets slightly complicated. But the guts of it is unbelievably important. Terribly smart people make totally bonkers mistakes by failing to pay heed to it.

Their wordsIt is easy to see that a quickly reached conclusion, triggered by Doubt-Avoidance Tendency, when combined with a tendency to resist any change in that conclusion, will naturally cause a lot of errors in cognition for modern man.

Their wordsDarwin’s result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had. In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact.

Their wordsI’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.” I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.

Their wordsThe best antidote to folly from an excess of self-regard is to force yourself to be more objective when you are thinking about yourself, your family and friends, your property, and the value of your past and future activity. This isn’t easy to do well and won’t work perfectly, but it will work much better than simply letting psychological nature take its normal course.

Their wordsobjectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you’re going to be a correct thinker.

Their wordsThe quantity of man’s pleasure from a ten- dollar gain does not exactly match the quantity of his displeasure from a ten-dollar loss. That is, the loss seems to hurt much more than the gain seems to help.

Their wordsFor some such reason, man’s evolution left him with Social-Proof Tendency, an automatic tendency to think and act as he sees others around him thinking and acting.

Their wordsLearn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.

Their wordsOne very practical consequence of Liking/ Loving Tendency is that it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to “Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency,” and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love.

Their wordsThis tendency was not in any of the psychology texts I once examined, at least in any coherent fashion, yet it dominates life. It accounts for the extreme result in the Milgram experiment and the extreme success of some cults that have stumbled through practice evolution into bringing pressure from many psychological tendencies to bear at the same time on conversion targets.

Their wordsIt is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.

Their wordsChecklist routines avoid a lot of errors. You should have all this elementary wisdom and then you should go through and have a checklist in order to use it. There is no other procedure that will work as well.

Their wordsthere is the way in which people form impressions very quickly to form an impression and then you spend most of your time confirming it instead of collecting evidence and so if accidentally your impression was in the wrong direction we are going to confirm it and you don't give yourself a chance to correct it

Their wordswe have no way of calibrating ourselves so that makes us wildly overconfident about what we know and reluctant to accept that we may be wrong

Their wordsour desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right the ego urges us to feel right at the expense of being right

Their wordswhen you try to prove how right you are you ignore all the evidence to the contrary

Their wordsI think the greatest tragedy of mankind and the greatest tragedy of most people is to hold opinions in their head that are wrong that they're attached to and that they don't stress test it's so easy to take those ideas and properly put them out there in an idea meritocratic way and have them stress tests which raises the probabilities of being right

Their wordsI went from thinking you know I'm right to asking myself how do I know I'm right in other words how do I triangulate it gave me the humility I needed to balance with my audacity and so then it gave me an open-mindedness

Their wordsit's beautiful because when people are coming close to a decision it becomes difficult to raise doubts or to raise questions people who are flowing the group down when the group's is nearing a decision a perceivers really you know person I mean you know this you want to get rid of them and the pre-mortem legitimizes that sort of descent and that sort of doubts not only legitimizes that too much rewards it

Their wordsI would advise people make a lot of decisions to keep track their decisions and of how they turned out so that later you can come and and evaluate your procedures and and see whether there is anything that is in common with those decision that turned out well and then not so well

Their wordsone basic rule is slow down especially if you if you have the immediate conviction slow down