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 greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.
The Resurrection miracle is nothing to you and me if it is only an event of eighteen centuries bygone. Unless we can live the immortal life - unless we can receive God to his own home in these hearts of ours - the texts are nothing to us unless these daily lives illustrate them.
What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.
To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed.
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