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Baruch Fischhoff: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from Baruch Fischhoff, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• After the fact, you'll swear you predicted it all along

  Baruch Fischhoff asked people to estimate the odds of different outcomes before Nixon's 1972 trip to China, then asked them again afterward to recall their original predictions. Pe…

  — Baruch Fischhoff, Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty

• You're more certain than you have any right to be

  Ask people how confident they are in an answer, and their stated certainty routinely outruns how often they're actually right. In classic calibration studies, people who said they …

  — Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence Judgments

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