Amanda Ripley Quotes

We tend to ignore the high probability of small gains or losses and focus on big payoffs or disaster despite remote odds.

The Optimism Bias: This is why our warnings on cigarette packages go unheeded. Yes smoking kills 6 million people per year. Smokers believe that it will kill the other guy.

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

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Very low probability events occur very rarely, but sometimes they do happen.

We are all vulnerable to the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, cognitively available risks rather than statistically likelier, but less salient, risks.

People react differently to hearing 'Procedure X has a 70 percent chance of survival' and 'Procedure Y has a 30 percent chance of death.' Phrased that way, people flock to Procedure X, even though the numbers are the same.

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.

That the chance of gain is naturally over-valued, we may learn from the universal success of lotteries.

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside, can seem more like constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others, because they reside in far too private a chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily trouble, but often the opposite. To have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish.

The other big lesson from Katrina is that it pays to be prepared. But it's also very difficult to stay prepared because the longer you go between events the more you'll see complacency.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

If you don't know the Jewelry, know the Jeweller

The events which can not be prevented, must be directed.

By looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, you can fundamentally change your reaction.

It's the investor who is risky, not the investment.

Risk is what you make of it.

Doubts are suppressed by groups... But remember that the internal incentives that shape how the group perceives risks and rewards may be very different from the reality of the risks and rewards in the external marketplace. Those incentives can distort risk perception.

I know that experts say you're more likely to get hurt crossing the street than you are flying, but that doesn't make me any less frightened of flying. If anything, it makes me more afraid of crossing the street.

Risk is a function of how poorly a strategy will perform if the 'wrong' scenario occurs.

By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of destruction+unfairness]. The dread equation is a simplification, but it's a way to explain why we fear something so much when it is so unlikely. Part of it is the lack of control. That's why we're more scared of plane crashes than car crashes even though we know rationally which is more dangerous.

We've greatly exaggerated the risk of sinking, without celebrating the value of swimming.

Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else.

Your perception plays tricks when you are hoping for something.