Eric Falkenstein shares some fun facts from Why We Make Mistakes:
- There is a 1 in 1 million chance of finding a gun in an airport check.
- People don’t remember names, as opposed to the jobs or families of a person.
- 80% of calls to a corporate help desk are for lost passwords.
- Simply changing pill colors from white to red and black makes them more distinctive.
- People recall their specific grades in school with an upward bias.
- Men report a median of 7 sex partners, women 4.
- 84% of doctors thought others were biased by self interest, whereas only 16% thought they were biased by self interest.
- The most common airplane accident is ‘controlled flight into terrain’, or flying a plane into the ground.
- When asked to pick a movie viewed later, more choose highbrow movies; choosing movies now we choose lowbrow movies.
- Being first on the ballot adds about 3% to a candidates vote.
- As something becomes familiar, the more we tend to notice it less.
- We see things not as they are, but as they ought to be.
- Experts make mistakes expecting patterns that aren’t there.
- Depressed people are realists, happy people are overconfident.
- People learn more from summaries than from reading entire chapters.
- A horse race handicapper does as well with 5 bits of information as having 10, 20, or 40, though his confidence increases with the number of information bits available.
- Hope impedes adaptation. Someone with a potentially reversible colonostemy is more unhappy after 1 year than someone with a 1 year irreversible colonostemy.
- When you are trying to make judgments about complex systems, things that are easily observed are overweighted.
- Money does not improve efficiency of large organizations (ie, giving everyone more money).
- Money does increase the ability of individuals to withstand discomfort in tests.