For geniuses, they are really dumb, she said. Some of them are really pampered: They can’t even put together a cardboard box. They don’t think you do something. They think you call somebody.
For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female - the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness!
Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment. The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean,
Belief in the Law of Small Numbers teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made—even when those people were trained statisticians. People mistook even a very small pa...
Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useles...
At one point he turned to Christie and said, Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.
After that, the men in the room rushed for the exits, apparently to sell their shares in Bear Stearns. By the time Alan Greenspan arrived to speak, there was hardly anyone who cared to hear what he ha...
After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.
A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins’ linemen put it,...
Fourth risk: the electrical grid. The river and its tributaries generate more than 40 percent of the hydroelectric power for the United States; were the dams to fail, the effects would be catastrophic...
Automated voices and the bells from the row of testing machines in the back. The walls were white cinder block, the floors speckled linoleum. At the front desk were four large black ladies. Leigh Anne...
Why, for example, wasn’t AIG required to reserve capital against them? Why, for that matter, were Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s willing to bless 80 percent of a pool of dicey mortgage loans with the s...
When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.
What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagi...
The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange n...
The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.
The difference in Billy wasn’t what had happened to him, but what hadn’t. He had a life he hadn’t led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.
The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.
Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Iris...
Knowledge is literally prediction, said Morey. Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally