By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.

“Because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean,” Danny later wrote, “it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”

Decision theory had approached the seeming contradiction at the heart of the Allais paradox as a technical problem. Danny found that silly: There was no contradiction. There was just psychology. The understanding of any decision had to account not just for the financial consequences but for the emotional ones, too.

People who didn’t know Daryl Morey assumed that because he had set out to intellectualize basketball he must also be a know-it-all. In his approach to the world he was exactly the opposite. He had a diffidence about him—an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making

We are exposed to a lifetime schedule in which we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

if you presented people with situations in which the evidence they needed to judge them accurately was hard for them to retrieve from their memories, and misleading evidence came easily to mind, they made mistakes. “Consequently,” Amos and Danny wrote, “the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.” Human judgment was distorted

Looking back over the previous five years, they now saw that they’d systematically overvalued their own players whenever another team tried to trade for them. Especially when offered the chance to trade one of their NBA players for another team’s draft picks, they’d refused deals they should have done. Why? They hadn’t done it consciously. Morey

All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. This “ability” to explain that which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any additional information, represents an important, though subtle, flaw in our reasoning.

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.