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WillowOne's Positions

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Overview

Kahneman's summary of forty years of work, much of it with Amos Tversky, on how people actually judge and decide. He frames the mind as two systems: System 1, which is fast, automatic, effortless and usually right, and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, effortful and lazy. Most of the book is a tour of the ways System 1 goes wrong and System 2 fails to notice: anchoring, availability, substitution of an easy question for a hard one, overconfidence, the planning fallacy, loss aversion, the halo effect, regression to the mean misread as cause and effect, and the difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self.

Notes

Most of the entries in the Thinking Tools folder of this vault trace back to this book. Its importance for me is less any single bias than the general lesson: the feeling of certainty is a product of System 1 and is not evidence of anything, and the intuitions I trust most are the ones I should check. It also underwrites my account of intuition as a compiled model, fast and usually adequate, built from experience, and silent about its own failure modes. Some of the experiments have not replicated well, and Kahneman said so himself, but the framework has survived better than the individual results.

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