When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret. As the starting point for a new theory, it sounded promising.

both mainly saw only what they had been trained to see. The problem was not what they knew, or didn’t know. It was their need for certainty or, at least, the appearance of certainty. Standing beside the slide projector,

psychology was a noisy dinner party during which the guests talked past one another and changed the subject with bewildering frequency. The Gestalt psychologists and the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts might all be jammed into the same building with a plaque on the front that said Department of Psychology, but they didn’t waste a lot of time

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.

Amos liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it.

People’s emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss. (Which is why they bought both lottery tickets and insurance.) “If you think about the possibilities at all, you

“He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.

Imagination wasn’t a flight with limitless destinations. It was a tool for making sense of a world of infinite possibilities by reducing them. The imagination obeyed rules: the rules of undoing. One rule was that the more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them. People seemed