Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other.

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.

As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions.

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.

When we exposed our subjects to more digits than they could remember, their pupils stopped dilating or actually shrank.

PAper by apple 'illusion of thinking' models there also stop spending compute tokens after a certain level of complexity

we would sometimes surprise both the owner of the pupil and our guests by asking, “Why did you stop working just now?” The answer from inside the lab was often, “How did you know?” to which we would reply, “We have a window to your soul.”

An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.

It is normally easy and actually quite pleasant to walk and think at the same time,

a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad.

you think with your body, not only with your brain.

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.

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.

Her experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud.

Can there be any doubt that the ubiquitous portraits of the national leader in dictatorial societies not only convey the feeling that “Big Brother Is Watching” but also lead to an actual reduction in spontaneous thought and independent action?

Feeling that one’s soul is stained appears to trigger a desire to cleanse one’s body, an impulse that has been dubbed the “Lady Macbeth effect.”

But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

The spreading of activation in the associative machine is automatic, but we (System 2) have some ability to control the search of memory, and also to program it so that the detection of an event in the environment can attract attention.

Statistical thinking derives conclusions about individual cases from properties of categories and ensembles. Unfortunately, System 1 does not have the capability for this mode of reasoning; System 2 can learn to think statistically, but few people receive the necessary training.

Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information. These are the circumstances in which intuitive errors are probable, which may be prevented by a deliberate intervention of System 2.

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.

If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you?

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects.

The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?).

An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.

“The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”

Self-centered, he nonetheless has a deep moral sense.

Michael Lewis’s bestselling Moneyball

Your probability that it will rain tomorrow is your subjective degree of belief, but you should not let yourself believe whatever comes to your mind.

However, we are not all rational, and some of us may need the security of distorted estimates to avoid paralysis.

because confidence, as we have seen, is determined by the coherence of the best story you can tell from the evidence at hand.

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

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.

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.

declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

In another paper, titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” they showed that men acted on their useless ideas significantly more often than women, and that as a result women achieved better investment results than men.

We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.

the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident.

In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels

A more general lesson that I learned from this episode was do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either.

I hope I am wiser today, and I have acquired a habit of looking for the outside view. But it will never be the natural thing to do.

When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed, disbelieving is hard work, and System 2 is easily tired.

This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative expectations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.

a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

System 2 may “know” that the probability is low, but this knowledge does not eliminate the self-generated discomfort and the wish to avoid it. System 1 cannot be turned off.

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.