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

the article described three ways in which people made judgments when they didn’t know the answer for sure. The names the authors had given these—representativeness, availability, anchoring—were at once weird and seductive.

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

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,

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see.

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.

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

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

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.”