Susan Okie Quotes

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

People never know what they want, though everyone says they do. If they did, nobody would ever be surprised.

I was accustomed to being in far, far riskier environments. So I thought going into that canyon was a walk in the park - there were no avalanches, it was a beautiful day and I was essentially just walking.

In the U.S.A. or Europe there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions.

We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

There are some problems that technology can't solve.

Public health authorities exaggerate health risks for the same reason that sharks eat seals—because that’s just what they do.

When people are involved, accidents will happen…. You don’t want to drink frack fluid.

We respond to the unknown by trying to retreat from it, or trying to comprehend it, or trying to control it. The first approach is evident in longings for return to a simpler "risk-free" life that never was. The second is reflected in the fantasy of synoptic risk assessment: Measure the requisite probabilities and trade-offs, calculate the social risk-benefit function, and the common good will have been defined. The third approach is in the tradition of professional engineering. It serves us well but, as engineers have been among the first to point out, has met its match and more in the complex social problems it increasingly is called upon to address.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.

There is a tendency to overestimate the positive things in our lives and underestimate the possibility of negative things

History sometimes makes fun of us and our best intentions.

Threats I have faced are unprecedented.

There's no such thing as a foolproof system. That idea fails to take into account the creativity of fools.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Humans are possessed, to some degree, with the power of foresight. Yet we so often learn things the hard way, through disaster.

Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way, and the reality is that autonomous vehicles in the future may have to do the same thing if they don't want to be the source of bottlenecks.

We all run the risk of thinking that people have common sense sometimes.

People are unpredictable at the end of the day.

There is no man, though never so little, but sometimes he can hurt.

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.

We wait until Pandora's box is opened before we say, "Wow, maybe we should understand what's in that box." This is the story of humans on every problem.