As Idiotic As Optimism Can Sometimes Seem,

In Their Leaders, Advisers, And Experts, People Much Prefer Overconfidence, Total Certainty, To Any Kind Of Doubt.

Don't Be Deceived By Life's Outcomes. Life's Outcomes, While Not Entirely Random, Have A Huge Amount Of Luck Baked Into Them.

A Tourist Can't Help But Have A Distorted Opinion Of A Place: He Meets Unrepresentative People, Has Unrepresentative Experiences, And Runs Around Imposing Upon The Place The Fantastic Mental Pictures He Had In His Head When He Got There.

If You Have A Patient In A Doctor's Office Who's Just Been Told They Have Terminal Cancer But There's This Operation They Could Perform Right Now That Might Save Their Lives. ... They Have A 90 Percent Chance Of Surviving The Operation — If You Tell Them That, They Respond One Way. If You Tell Them ... That They Have A 10 Percent Chance Of Being Killed By The Operation, They Are About Three Times Less Likely To Have The Operation.

Looking Into It A Bit, Jamie Found That The Model Used By Wall Street To Price Leaps, The Black-scholes Option Pricing Model, Made Some Strange Assumptions.