It might seem daunting to think that effort and chance, as much as innate talent, are what counts. But I find… — Leonard Mlodinow
It might seem daunting to think that effort and chance, as much as innate talent, are what counts. But I find it encouraging because, while our genetic makeup is out of our control, our degree of effort is up to us. And the effects of chance, too, can be controlled to the extent that by committing ourselves to repeated attempts, we can increase our odds of success.
p. 162Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.
Obviously it can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. We cannot see a persons potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person. The normal accident theory of life shows not that the connection between actions and rewards is random but that random influences are as important as our qualities and actions.
p. 209
The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.
p. 28
