[b]Daniel Kahneman
You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.[/b]
Let’s imagine that this is actually true.
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume reduced the principles of association to three: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. Our concept of association has changed radically since Hume’s days, but his three principles still provide a good start.
We’ll need a context of course. No, really.
If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.
You know, whether it is warranted or not.
…the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment. This procedure makes better use of the knowledge available to members of the group than the common practice of open discussion.
Fortunately [or unfortunately], that’s never been the proper way here.
A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.
Unless it’s nature all the way down.
A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.
Unless of course nothing could be further from the truth.