Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

LESS IS MORE, SOMETIMES EVEN IN JOINT EVALUATION

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.

taking a shower and doing nothing would have been a better policy than implementing the ideas that came to their minds.

Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.