We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that we often overlook clear truths and are unaware of our own ignorance.
Daniel Kahneman highlights the human tendency to ignore evident facts and remain oblivious to our lack of understanding. He suggests that not only do we miss the obvious, but we also fail to recognize that we are missing it, which can lead to misguided beliefs and poor decision-making.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about decision-making in business meetings.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
Virtue does not come from wealth, but wealth, and every other good thing which men have comes from virtue.
This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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