The contents of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, though perhaps some are contestable, are surprising and mostly new to this layman, and we should all know these things about ourselves, therefore it’s an important book. Presumably this is a retrospective and a compilation so that all this knowledge is available in various books and articles elsewhere, but this is a fine and good way to get it.
Kahneman has led a charmed life it seems. An Israeli old enough to have been around soon after the founding, he was lucky to be in right places at right times – tapped for instance to devise the interview at the Bakum, the induction centre through which practically the entire nation passes. Then he discovered his intellectual partner and the two of them did most of their thinking deep in conversation whilst strolling through Jerusalem, doing psychological and sociological thought experiments that they must have wondered excitedly, incredulously why nobody had thought of before. Then, no fool he, off it was to seats of higher learning in America and never looking back. Because his work has demonstrated some of the human mind’s built-in rational fallaciousness, it has affected economics, which generally presumes people are rational, so much that the work won him a Nobel Prize in Economics.
I’d heard of his book Thinking, Fast and Slow for a few years here and there, but it was finally seeing the Google guys listening enraptured to him at a workshop held by John Brockman of edge.org that finally sent me whizzing, or should I say double Home Button clicking, to the Amazon app and finally buying the book.
Here he explicates the experiments, both his and others’, that demonstrate some of our irrationality. And he lays out a simple schema to help us hang this all on. There are two mental systems, System 1 and System 2, which correspond somewhat to the unconscious and conscious minds. System 2 is lazy and only kicks in when it sees System 1 is failing. But sometimes it is blind to System 1’s failures, so that we end up making mistakes. This is what makes us Humans rather than the chimerical Econs.
So what are the fallacies? There are many, and they are interrelated. Some are to do with memory, some with improper framing. Kahneman has enough confidence in his ideas that he can offer some prescriptives in how to improve one’s thinking. Occasionally I saw how arrogant he must be, despite his gifted twinkling face, because he categorically cast as mistakes, mental abberations, conclusions that didn’t seem to me necessarily wrong.
The style is cogent and literate, but ultimately he seems to eschew style and personality in order to emphasize clarity and simplicity. This is a book however that I recommend for the knowledge it contains. Some of it I already knew from popular articles and general reading, but most of it I didn’t. And this is stuff we should know about ourselves, which is what the book is about, nothing less. In that sense it’s an important book. Presumably this knowledge is all avaiable elsewhere, but this is a fine and good way to get it.
I’m already trying to put it into practice, aware of my fallacious framing after a trip to the car mechanic to fix something a second time. This reminded me of the question about the woman who gets to the theatre and realizes she’s misplaced her two $80 tickets. Should she buy two more? Contrast this with a situation where she lost $160 in cash; should she still buy tickets? Our framing makes it more likely that we would not buy a second pair of tickets in the former case, but would in the latter. This perhaps is one of the cases I’m not fully convinced is a mistake. It’s telling that the example is going to the theatre. Kahneman picks this example seemingly at random, but going to the theatre is likely an optional activity, and it’s rational to cordon these off from the rest of life. Kahneman does not go into this at all, and that is what I mean by his arrogance. Perhaps we would all choose differently if we knew she was an undercover theatre critic and reviewing this play was vital to her career; under those circumstances we would much more likely not care about whether she lost the ticket or cash or whatever. So it’s almost a trick; we bring unexamined assumptions as soon as we hear the word “going to the theatre” that affect our judgment. Perhaps that’s the more pertinent lesson then, that we should try to be aware of these. But that is difficult, very difficult.
I know it’s tough to think properly and read at the same time – this objection to this theatre example I only just thought of now as I write this, not while reading – so this is really a book to read slowly and take note of each example. But as I said, one to read.
