Kyle’s Reviews > Thinking, Fast and Slow > Status Update

The sudden switch from economics to experienced well-being comes a little too late in the game, very difficult to get on-board with lifestyle changes that are based on gains and losses (or winners and losers represented by percentages). And then to discover that much of the preceding chapters were more succinctly stated in the academic articles in the Appendices prompted more frustration. Does it ruin the whole book?

Long gone are clinical observations of pupil dilation or synapses firing, no more helping people explore their mind; from here on out, Nobel Prize-winner Kahneman only seems to be concerned with Econ and the things his subjects will do for money. Had I not just read Watts’ Just So, I might have bought into dangling-carrots as wisdom, but now can’t stop thinking of money as a measure and wealth ineffable.

The thought experiments devised by Prof. Kahneman seem to fall into a predictable pattern: he creates a profile of fictional person and asks students to determine the career path of the made-up case study. Often he reports how easily they fall into obvious assumptions - isn’t that the purpose he is testing? Seems a bit dubious that he himself has the story straight and just who is his book helping, hedgehog or fox?

Even more functions are itemized and described with the detachment of a smarmy Seinfeld stand-up act or lame Leno monologue opener: “what’s the deal with people and their System 1s?” Kahneman only points out our collective foibles without any distinction for those of us not influenced by heuristics, anchors or availability. I wonder if he or his dearly departed Amos collected cars like their comic counterparts?

Straying outside the individuation bubble to see what more recent psychologists think about the way people behave, it is impressive how clearly Kahneman describes the two systems, the intuitive 1 and statistical 2, and the dilation in eyes can be one of the strongest thought indicators; and yet with so many parlour-trick cognitive puzzles, I find myself tending towards the unexpected solutions with System 2 on alert.