I consider myself a very rational man, explaining all randomness with statistical tools and refusing to recognize the existence of the hand of fate and supernatural forces.Read more at location 490
I feel revulsion toward astrologers, readers of coffee grounds, and all sorts of experts adorned with academic degrees, who manipulate their audiences emotionally and whom I suspect of being driven by self-interest.Read more at location 496
Rational versus irrational, mind versus emotion, study versus prayer – for me, all these terms describe the contrast between my father and my mother.Read more at location 499
My adolescent rebellion erupted when I was about fourteen: I wanted to become fervently religious and asked my father to buy me a tallit katan (Jewish undergarment with fringes).Read more at location 517
In presenting the decision problem as a set of alternatives, it is assumed that the way in which the alternatives are presented to the decision maker does not affect his decision.Read more at location 542
we presume that the rational man does not take such non-essential factors into consideration and, therefore, these factors are excluded from the description of the decision problem.Read more at location 553
We generally refer to a single individual, but sometimes a decision maker is a group of individuals such as a family, committee or commercial enterprise. On the other hand, there are cases when an individual, let’s call him Moses, is split into two decision makers, Moses 1 is Moses after being slapped by his brother Aaron, and Moses 2 is the Moses who has calmed down the next morning.Read more at location 557
It is possible to think of a decision maker as a machine that receives data about a set of alternatives he must choose from,Read more at location 570
Psychologists and brain science researchers are interested in the structure of the machine that processes the data and reaches a decision.Read more at location 571
