Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

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

if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality;

“The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”

And the more luck was involved, the less there is to be learned.

I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and 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.

You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

Richer and more realistic assumptions do not suffice to make a theory successful.

theory-induced blindness,

Conventional indifference maps and Bernoulli’s representation of outcomes as states of wealth share a mistaken assumption: that your utility for a state of affairs depends only on that state and is not affected by your history. Correcting that mistake has been one of the achievements of behavioral economics.

Brain recordings also indicate that buying at especially low prices is a pleasurable event.

The psychologist Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that 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.

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

Life, however, is usually a between-subjects experiment, in which you see only one formulation at a time.

money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement.

The ultimate currency that rewards or punishes is often emotional, a form of mental self-dealing that inevitably creates conflicts of interest when the individual acts as an agent on behalf of an organization.

The emotions that people attach to the state of their mental accounts are not acknowledged in standard economic theory.

It takes an active and disciplined mind to raise such a difficult question.

It is the departure from the default that produces regret.

success is generally a more normal outcome than is failure.

We spend much of our day anticipating, and trying to avoid, the emotional pains we inflict on ourselves.

If you can remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you are likely to experience less of it.

We normally experience life in the between-subjects mode, in which contrasting alternatives that might change your mind are absent, and of course WYSIATI.

Choice and Consequence.

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”

Rational agents are expected to know their tastes, both present and future, and they are supposed to make good decisions that will maximize these interests.

Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing.

The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savored but as a future memory to be designed.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise.

Living with children also imposes a significant cost in the currency of daily feelings—reports of stress and anger are common among parents, but the adverse effects on life evaluation are smaller.

The people who wanted money and got it were significantly more satisfied than average; those who wanted money and didn’t get it were significantly more dissatisfied.

goals—one recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The central fact of our existence is that time is the ultimate finite resource, but the remembering self ignores that reality.

The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.

Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.