Sublime

La apuesta Samuelson se llama así en honor de Paul Samuelson, el economista que la había ideado. Tal y como explicó Amos, cuando a la gente se le ofrece una sola apuesta en la que tiene un 50 por ciento de probabilidades de ganar ciento cincuenta dólares o perder cien, por lo general no la acepta. Pero si ofreces a esas mismas personas la posibilid

An improvising mind, unmoored from stable beliefs and desires, might seem to be a recipe for mental chaos. I shall argue that the opposite is true: the very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behaviour as coherent as possible – to stay ‘in character’ as well as we are able.

Two decades later, in 1995, the American psychologist Thomas Gilovich, who collaborated in turn with Danny and Amos, coauthored a study that examined the relative happiness of silver and bronze medal winners at the 1992 Summer Olympics. From video footage, subjects judged the bronze medal winners to be happier than the silver medal winners. The sil

familiarity factor.

That sort of argument just bugged the hell out of Sam. He hated the way inherently probabilistic situations would be interpreted, after the fact, as having been black-and-white, or good and bad, or right and wrong. So much of what made his approach to life different from most people’s was his willingness to assign probabilities and act on them, and

End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future. Harvard