Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Started: June 16th, 2012
Finished: October 31st, 2012
Pages: 481

Wow.  I think this is a record.  I'm not sure I've ever taken this long to read a book.   At least, not one that I never gave up on or restarted during the time period in question.

Oddly, this is actually a recommendation for Thinking, Fast and Slow.   It was so interesting that I really wanted to finish it.  And its short chapters are conducive to intermittent reading, so I could pick it up and read a self-contained chunk even after a couple of weeks away.

What's it about?  How we think.  How we make decisions.  And how the structure of our brain can work against us.

Daniel Kahneman is an experimental psychologist who shared a Nobel Prize in economics for his work  on decision-making, and more specifically on "prospect theory", an explanation of how human beings make decisions involving economic risks and rewards in uncertain conditions.  His shocking conclusion: people do not typically make rational decisions.  Instead they make "irrational" ones in predictable ways that overweight the risk of losses, and underweight the benefits of probable but uncertain gains.

Kahneman and his chief collaborator, Amos Tversky, were led to this conclusion by years of work on decision making.  But the book is fundamentally not just about prospect theory, as interesting as that is.  Instead it's a coherent summary of the current understanding of how our brains function, and how that affects our thoughts and the decisions that we each make every day.

In some ways this is a very depressing book. In the same way your visual intuition can be quite easily fooled by any of the standard 'optical illusions' (like the ones that ask you to judge which line is longer or shorter), your judgement can quite predictably affected by a number of perceptual factors like "narrow framing", "anchors", and a failure to understand the phenomena of regression to the mean.  Kahneman demonstrates this with specific examples.   In each case he provides a scenario, asks you to make a judgement, describes the typical responses and how those responses are logically wrong, and then explains the research in that specific area.

Why is this all depressing?  Everyone likes to believe that *they* aren't easily fooled.  But if you're honest about it, at least some of the time you'll find yourself making exactly the responses that Kahneman analyzes. And even if you avoided every erroneous intuition in the entire book....it would be by concentrating on the specific questions that he asks.  In Kahneman's terms, it would be by employing "System 2" in your brain: the thoughtful rational agent.  But none of use "System 2" all of the time.   It's slow.  It requires effort.  And the quick-thinking, reactive "System 1" is what gets us through most days.  "System 1" recognizes habitual situations, and warns us and allows us to react quickly when we encounter something surprising....like the car that's about to sideswipe us in traffic.  We can't live without System 1.  In real life we use System 1 all of the time.  And it's primarily the behaviour of System 1 that Kahneman describes.

Kahneman had a noble goal in writing Thinking, Fast and Slow.  He wants to make people more aware of System 1 and how it works, and wants to give us tools to help ourselves to recognize situations where we need to trigger System 2.  But he also says that after a lifetime of studying the brain and decision-making, he hasn't noticed himself getting notably better at decisions.

The next time you get excited, or upset, or motivated by political rhetoric, or advertising of any kind, you should stop and think about exactly *how* that statement was put together.  It's likely that it was crafted by someone who has studied Mr. Kahneman's work.  Which is the real reason that this is such a depressing book.