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

Ok Im so over this book already—way too analytical, like treating humans as lab rats to study behavior about gambling, hiring candidates, and a slew of hypotheticals that IMO say hardly anything revealing or enlightening at all. It’s like spending decades on research for something that common sense can explain in a matter of seconds—people are greedy, people avoid loss, want to save face, etc.!

He actually makes the point that ‘his’ thinking is not a human way of thinking—he divides us up into Humans and Econs. No wonder his view of reality is totally alien to me (and distasteful, Nobel Prize and all—who wants to see people as numbers, probabilities and choices?) Completely detached from passion. This book never discusses war, and wartime decisions, or split decisions. It’s all safely tucked.

Wonder how a boxer or an MMA fighter might say all of this? Kahneman speaks of risk from behind a desk, with glasses and a “labcoat” on. Everything feels wayyyy too scientific, too many numbers for wishy-washy psychological states

On clear days when my mind & brain feel robust and hale, I can make use of this book’s schematics—but on most days I’m just using my own damn, non-Nobel-prize-winning, common sense. This book kinda makes the case for why economists’ language does not yet reflect reality (e.g. all people are rational). It shows how hair-splitting and rhetorical socioeconomic theory can be…