This is a brilliant book, a tour de force from one of the deepest thinkers and psychologists of our time. This is a book that explains clearly why we do what we do and why we make the choices we make. And how can we perhaps steer ourselves clear of some of the more obvious obstacles in our path by being more aware of our own biases and fallacies.
This is a book about understanding how the mind works and how this understanding, helps each one of us make better decisions by improving our ability to identify and understand errors of judgement and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. This is Daniel's biggest contribution. You cannot understand what you cannot articulate. In this book, Daniel introduces a language for thinking and talking about the mind.
Daniel and Amos worked for many years together to document the 'short cuts' or heuristics in our intuitive thinking that manifest as biases that skew the way we interpret the situation and take decisions. Heuristics such as the availability heuristic explains why some issues are very important in the public's mind and while others are neglected. 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.
How does the mind work? The title is actually the dead giveaway. Daniel explains in fascinating detail, with lots of insightful examples how we use two types of thinking which he calls as System 1 and System 2 thinking. The intuitive System 1 or fast thinking which operates automatically, quickly with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control and System 2 is the slower more deliberative thinking which allocates attention to effortful mental activities. The interaction of the two systems is the recurrent theme of this book and simply understanding how these systems interact would be enormously beneficial to the reader.
This is not an easy book to read though it is extremely readable. The book moves on from the two systems approach to judgement and choice to the study of judgement heuristics. It answers the question 'why is it so difficult to think statistically?'The book then explores the puzzling aspect of our mind - our propensity to overestimate what we think we know and our inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance.
At the close, one of the most fascinating distinctions drawn by Daniel in his book is the distinction between our experiencing self and remembered self. The distinction is crucial to our measurement of well-being. What makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. The decisions that we take and our overall happiness depends on how our two selves pursue happiness.
As Kahneman says 'Like medicine, the identification of judgement errors is a diagnostic task, which requires a precise vocabulary'. Labels such as 'anchoring effect', 'halo effect', 'narrow framing' bring together in memory everything we need to know about a bias.
Finally the book is really about providing a richer language so essential to the skill of constructive criticism. A remarkable book and a seminal work, this is a must read for every one as we all fight the same fight - how to make better decisions inspite of ourselves.
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