Thinking, Fast and Slow

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  • Author:: Daniel Kahneman
  • Full Title:: Thinking, Fast and Slow

• 🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

  • Our brain is a combination of Homer Simpson (System 1) and Mr.Spoke (System 2), although Homer is usually much louder and often steals the show
  • We are very lousy decision-makers: overly susceptible to availability bias, priming we also suffer from unreasonable loss aversion
  • We have 2 selves, the self that experiences and the self that remembers, the remembering one gets more attention

• 🎨 Impressions

  • This is one of the most influential books I have read recently, and it will leave a long lasting mark on me. The concepts introduced by Dr.Kahneman are both groundbreaking and fascinating, and while they are easy to grasp, their applications are profound and ubiquitous.
  • They bring us one step closer to understand ourselves, our behaviors and why we tend to think or believe things the way we do.
  • We proud ourselves as intelligent, logical and rational beings, and we are also convinced that our rational self is in control but that is quite a disillusion with actual consequences.
  • Understanding these concepts can definitely give us more perspective, and humility, and more importantly be more considerate with others, especially when they behave in a way we don’t find rational.

• How I Discovered It

  • Surprise, surprise! Yes, once more Bill Gates book recommendations. Although, I now realized that this book is mentioned everywhere in the self-help genre.

• Who Should Read It?

  • Literally everybody! It is easy to read, relatively to the concepts covered in the book, with engaging examples and funny anecdotes.
  • In particular, I think that any person involved in people management, decision making, or any profession that involves critical thinking and strong reasoning will gain invaluable insights reading this book.

• ☘️ How the Book Changed Me

  • How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.
    • I am more aware of my System 1‘s shortcomings, although, as Dr.Kahneman often confesses, I probably can’t help it much
    • I’m more conscious about availability bias and priming
    • I try to be more self-aware when I experience new things

• ✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

  • Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight . (Location 225)

  • Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation : our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance . (Location 3322)

  • The world makes much less sense than you think . The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works . (Location 939)

• 📒 Summary + Notes

  • I did better than writing a summary of the book. I made a presentation!
  • think fast and slow.pptx

• Highlights first synced by Readwise November 29th, 2020

  • People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media . (Location 126)
  • This is the essence of intuitive heuristics : when faced with a difficult question , we often answer an easier one instead , usually without noticing the substitution . (Location 204)
  • Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight . (Location 225)
  • two important facts about our minds : we can be blind to the obvious , and we are also blind to our blindness . (Location 334)
  • it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own . (Location 407)
  • This matters , because anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think . (Location 431)
  • System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy , and it has a sweet tooth . (Location 620)
  • This remarkable priming phenomenon — the influencing of an action by the idea — is known as the ideomotor effect . (Location 851)
  • You can see why the common admonition to “ act calm and kind regardless of how you feel ” is very good advice : you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind . (Location 871)
  • The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism : a reluctance to be involved with others , to depend on others , or to accept demands from others . (Location 891)
  • You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience . But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on . (Location 915)
    • Tags: subjectivity
  • Priming phenomena arise in System 1 , and you have no conscious access to them . (Location 917)
  • System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs , and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions . (Location 931)
  • “ The world makes much less sense than you think . The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works . ” (Location 939)
  • ease in perceiving a word you have seen earlier , and it is this sense of ease that gives you the impression of familiarity . (Location 980)
  • A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition , because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth . (Location 1002)
  • If you care about being thought credible and intelligent , do not use complex language where simpler language will do . (Location 1017)
  • Cognitive strain , whatever its source , mobilizes System 2 , which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1 . (Location 1060)
  • In fact , all the headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence : a large event is supposed to have consequences , and consequences need causes to explain them . (Location 1233)
  • Witnesses who exchange their experiences will tend to make similar errors in their testimony , reducing the total value of the information they provide . Eliminating redundancy from your sources of information is always a good idea . (Location 1396)
  • simple rule can help : before an issue is discussed , all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position . This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group . (Location 1399)
  • The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create . The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant . (Location 1410)
  • It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story , not its completeness . (Location 1443)
  • Indeed , you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern . (Location 1444)
  • As we shall see , however , System 1 is inept when faced with “ merely statistical ” facts , which change the probability of outcomes but do not cause them to happen . (Location 1766)
  • this is the case , the differences between dense and rural counties do not really count as facts : they are what scientists call artifacts , observations that are produced entirely by some aspect of the method of research — in this case , by differences in sample size . (Location 1788)
  • The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion . (Location 1895)
  • The simple answer to these questions is that if you follow your intuition , you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic . We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random . (Location 1901)
  • we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability , and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify . Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality . (Location 1919)
  • The psychological mechanisms that produce anchoring make us far more suggestible than most of us would want to be . And of course there are quite a few people who are willing and able to exploit our gullibility . (Location 2061)
  • the anchoring effect is reduced or eliminated when the second mover focuses his attention on the minimal offer that the opponent would accept , or on the costs to the opponent of failing to reach an agreement . (Location 2076)
  • The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy . The media do not just shape what the public is interested in , but also are shaped by it . (Location 2268)
  • The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality ; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed . (Location 2270)
  • The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks : we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight — nothing in between . (Location 2369)
  • it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm . Terrorism speaks directly to System 1 . (Location 2379)
  • You surely understand in principle that worthless information should not be treated differently from a complete lack of information , but WYSIATI makes it very difficult to apply that principle . (Location 2529)
  • System 1 averages instead of adding , so when the non - feminist bank tellers are removed from the set , subjective probability increases . (Location 2680)
  • The solution to the puzzle appears to be that a question phrased as “ how many ? ” makes you think of individuals , but the same question phrased as “ what percentage ? ” does not . (Location 2711)
  • Subjects ’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular . (Location 2895)
  • Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not , we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty . (Location 2937)
  • We will not learn to understand regression from experience . Even when a regression is identified , as we saw in the story of the flight instructors , it will be given a causal interpretation that is almost always wrong . (Location 3267)
  • A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability . (Location 3296)
    • Tags: pink
  • The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance . (Location 3308)
  • Paradoxically , it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little , when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle . (Location 3321)
  • Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation : our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance . (Location 3322)
  • Once you adopt a new view of the world ( or of any part of it ) , you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed . (Location 3343)
  • The tendency to revise the history of one’s beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion . (Location 3359)
  • Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers . It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad . (Location 3360)
  • The CEO of a successful company is likely to be called flexible , methodical , and decisive . Imagine that a year has passed and things have gone sour . The same executive is now described as confused , rigid , and authoritarian . (Location 3420)
  • System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence — and it is not designed to know the size of its jumps . (Location 3458)
  • Confidence is a feeling , which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it . (Location 3517)
  • Everything makes sense in hindsight , a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events . And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday . The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future . (Location 3622)
  • experts try to be clever , think outside the box , and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions . Complexity may work in the odd case , but more often than not it reduces validity . (Location 3732)
  • More generally , the financial benefits of self - employment are mediocre : given the same qualifications , people achieve higher average returns by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own . (Location 4320)
  • However , optimism is highly valued , socially and in the market ; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers . (Location 4411)
  • I call it theory - induced blindness : once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking , it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws . (Location 4613)
  • As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed , disbelieving is hard work , and System 2 is easily tired . (Location 4619)
  • The self is more motivated to avoid bad self - definitions than to pursue good ones . Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones . ” (Location 5037)
  • According to prospect theory , however , some strokes count more than others . Failing to make par is a loss , but missing a birdie putt is a foregone gain , not a loss . (Location 5065)
  • industry of “ structured settlements ” exists to provide certainty at a hefty price , by taking advantage of the certainty effect . (Location 5211)
  • Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes — a feature of intuitive decision making — eventually leads to inferior outcomes . (Location 5373)
  • Although overestimation and overweighting are distinct phenomena , the same psychological mechanisms are involved in both : focused attention , confirmation bias , and cognitive ease . (Location 5418)
  • The successful execution of a plan is specific and easy to imagine when one tries to forecast the outcome of a project . In contrast , the alternative of failure is diffuse , because there are innumerable ways for things to go wrong . (Location 5451)
  • finance research has documented a massive preference for selling winners rather than losers — a bias that has been given an opaque label : the disposition effect . (Location 5771)
  • The decision to invest additional resources in a losing account , when better investments are available , is known as the sunk - cost fallacy , a costly mistake that is observed in decisions large and small . Driving into the blizzard because one paid for tickets is a sunk - cost error . (Location 5789)
  • The members of the board do not necessarily believe that the new CEO is more competent than the one she replaces . They do know that she does not carry the same mental accounts and is therefore better able to ignore the sunk costs of past investments in evaluating current opportunities . (Location 5803)
  • people expect to have stronger emotional reactions ( including regret ) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction . (Location 5842)
  • My personal hindsight - avoiding policy is to be either very thorough or completely casual when making a decision with long - term consequences . (Location 5915)
  • people generally anticipate more regret than they will actually experience , because they underestimate the efficacy of the psychological defenses they will deploy — which they label the “ psychological immune system . ” (Location 5917)
  • Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise , most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame - bound rather than reality - bound . (Location 6186)
  • Your moral feelings are attached to frames , to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself . (Location 6238)
  • the person who lost tickets were to ask for my advice , this is what I would say : “ Would you have bought tickets if you had lost the equivalent amount of cash ? If yes , go ahead and buy new ones . ” Broader frames and inclusive accounts generally lead to more rational decisions . (Location 6259)
  • People will check the box if they have already decided what they wish to do . If they are unprepared for the question , they have to make the effort of thinking whether they want to check the box . (Location 6292)
  • story is about significant events and memorable moments , not about time passing . (Location 6484)
  • The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savored but as a future memory to be designed . (Location 6522)
  • Higher income brings with it higher satisfaction , well beyond the point at which it ceases to have any positive effect on experience (Location 6670)
  • “ Don’t do it , you will regret it . ” The advice sounds wise because anticipated regret is the verdict of the remembering self and we are inclined to accept such judgments as final and conclusive . (Location 6885)
  • rationality is logical coherence — reasonable or not . (Location 6917) resonate
  • System 1 registers the cognitive ease with which it processes information , but it does not generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable . Intuitive answers come to mind quickly and confidently , whether they originate from skills or from heuristics . There is no simple way for System 2 to distinguish between a skilled and a heuristic response . (Location 7025)
  • They will make better choices when they trust their critics to be sophisticated and fair , and when they expect their decision to be judged by how it was made , not only by how it turned out . (Location 7061)