Title Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author Daniel Kahneman
Kind of Book Science/Psychology/Rationality
How strongly I recommend it 10/10
My Impressions A very humbling look at all the ways in which our brain’s make errors in judgment. In “Thinking Fast and Slow” Daniel Kahneman details his life’s work studying, labeling and testing cognitive illusions (aka cognitive biases). I really enjoyed this book! Although according to the “peak-end rule” it is very possible that my experience while reading the majority of the book was just average, but because my experience reading the end of the book was enjoyable, now I remember the whole book as being enjoyable... (head explosion)
Date Read March 2018 & circa 2020
Practical Takeaways
Use finger or pen to read
Find ways to frame things to your advantage (dates, business, work etc.)
Pay attention to the default option selected for you. Tip however much you want to tip: not whatever the default option is. (same with opting in to become an organ donor)
Take more pictures (your remembering self will appreciate it)
Don’t multitask when eating really good food. Just enjoy it. Multitasking will diminish your experience of the food/drink
Don't move to a warmer climate to increase your well being (californias are no happier than midwesterners and Scandinavian countries are among happiest)
Make sure the number of times making love exceeds the number of quarrels you have in your marriage. (You don’t want the number to be negative.)
When selling things sell valuable items alone. Not in bundles with less valuable items
Reward people for good behavior rather than punishing them for bad behavior
Spend money with your credit card the same way you would spend money with cash
Make people opt out of the thing you want vs opt in to get it (true for mailing lists)
Don't judge whether an experience was good or bad by your remembering self alone
Don't devote your entire vacation/life to the construction of memories. Put the camera away and enjoy yourself (you're experiencing self will thank you)
Don't devote your entire vacation/life to experiencing life. Take some pictures. Your remembering self will thank you)
Find more time to do things you enjoy
Control your use of time
"learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.”
Don't have a conversation in loud environments to save cognitive energy
Don't read in dim light
Get plenty of sleep
(haggling) if you think the other side has made an outrageous first offer, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear that you're unwilling to haggle with that number on the table.
(public policy) widespread fears, even if they are unreasonable, should not be ignored by policy makers. (Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating) policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.
Big Ideas
We tend to overestimate how much we understand about the world
We tend to underestimate how big a role chance plays in determining the outcomes of things
Manipulation/illusions often still work even if you are aware of their existence
The brain is lazy (does the least amount of work it has to do)
We can do several system 1 things at once, but only one system 2 activity at a time
switching from one task to another is effortful
when we are cognitively busy, we are more likely to default to bad habits or unpleasant behaviors
When people see a list of attributes the sequence matters, because the first attribute tends to shade their impression
The government prioritizes things the public react strongly to, not things that under objective rational analysis should be given the most attention
Media Coverage is biased toward novelty and poignancy
When we hear statistics about what people do in psychology experiments we rarely think that they apply to us
Positive Reinforcement is more potent than Negative reinforcement
We are more prone to infer the particular from the general than infer the general from the particular
High subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy
Experts are typically inferior to algorithms
Intuition comes from recognition based on experience
People with Optimism Bias are often happy and well liked
People are loss adverse ie. We dislike losing more than we like winning
We are loss adverse because potential threats are more important for survival than potential gains
Loss aversion rises when stakes rise
Poorer people are more risk adverse than richer people
We asses things based on what they’re relative to
Bad is stronger than good
We care more about not looking bad than we do about looking good
People love/need justice (it lights up pleasure centers in the brain)
Putting a statistic in a percent makes it sound small. Putting it in terms of 1 out of X makes it sound large
People can learn to notice and prevent the Sunk cost fallacy
Regret and Blame are both evoked by comparison to the norm
If something is discovered that contradicts the existing scientific theory, it is more likely that the finding is wrong than the Scientific theory is wrong (because theories have been peer tested and replicated and are therefore robust)
People select whatever option is default for them most of the time
Pain and Pleasure point us to do everything we do
The experiencing self and remembering self have different values
People who take pictures value remembering self over experiencing self
Our remembering self makes decisions
PTSD is bad mostly because of the long term suffering it causes, not just the experience
Surprising Facts
the pupils dilate when system 2 is working. Once we solve a problem (or give up) the pupils contract
The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body.
Effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, you blood glucose level drops.
Tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger play a role.
Sometimes when people see familiar ideas couched in pretentious and overly flowery language they see it as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility
people put better to avoid bogey than to make birdie
A small % of people do most of the suffering (pareto distribution)
Climate is not an important determinant of well-being
Setting goals that are difficult to maintain is bad for well-being
Married people's well-being increases up the point of marriage and then declines after marriage on average
Poorer people are more risk adverse than richer people
People select whatever option is default for them most of the time
There is no overall difference in the experienced well being of married and unmarried women
well-being is heritable (based on temperament)
Setting goals that are difficult to maintain is bad for well-being
Climate is not an important determinant of well-being
Unknown Terms
Miswanting refers to the fact that people sometimes make mistakes about how much they will like something in the future. That is, people often mispredict the duration of their good and bad feelings.
System 1 (automatic system): this cognitive system is (intuitive) and operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control *is more influential than your experience tells you (people think they are less influenced by unconscious motivators than they are) can’t be turned off. Takes care of survival and emergencies. fight of flight
System 2 (effortful system): this cognitive system is (deliberate) and allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations….often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration (when we think of ourselves, we identify with system 2) In charge of self control.
The Halo Effect (aka Exaggerated Emotional Coherence) The tendency to like or dislike everything about a person-including things you have not observed- based on something you have observed. eg. friendly person therefore he must be a good teacher.
Framing Effects: This cognitive bias is the phenomenon where different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions
Judgement Heuristic (substitution) If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not readily available, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. (eg. How happy are you with you life? =how happy are you with your relationship?)
Heuristic: A simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.
e.g. Happy are you with your life? gets changed the the heuristic question what is my mood right now? The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let’s not substitute
Availability Cascade: This cognitive bias is the phenomenon whereby the government prioritizes things the public react strongly to, not things that under objective rational analysis should be given the most attention. The mechanism through which biases flow into policy… the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (and emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind. ex: how much attention terror attacks get vs. cardiac arrest
Sorts Illustrated Jinx whoever is on the cover of Sports Illustrated will have a worse season. This is explained by regression to the mean. It is likely they just had a randomly good season before
Our mind is strongly biased toward casual explanations and does not deal well with ‘mere statistics’.
Formula for marital stability Frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels. You don’t want the number to be negative.
This algorhyhtm predicts marital stability better than any other.
Theory Induced Blindness Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extremely difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. pg277
John Gottman's Ratio for a stable relationship: good interactions must outnumber bad interactions 5 to 1
Possibility Effect: causes highly unlikely outcomes to be weighted disproportionately more than they ‘deserve’ (For example, the move from a 0% chance to a 5% possibility of winning a prize is more attractive than a change from 5% to 10%) with 0% there is no possibility of winning with 1% there is a possibility. "People over-weight small probabilities, which explains lottery gambling—a small expense with the possibility of a big win"
Certainty Effect: Outcomes that are almost certain are given less weight than their probability justifies. (For example, a move from a 50% to a 60% chance of winning a prize has a smaller emotional impact than a move from a 95% chance to a 100% (certainty) chance.)
Frame Bound: there can often be two different ways of stating the same thing. e.g. “90% survival rate” and “10% mortality rate” According to ____; the truth conditions of these two sentences are not identical, because the two statements elicit such different emotional reactions. T(his is the opposite of “reality bound” definition where because the truth conditions of these two sentences are identical they “mean” the same thing )
Reality Bound: there can often be two different ways of stating the same thing. e.g. “90% survival rate” and “10% mortality rate” According to _____frame; the truth conditions of these two sentences are identical. This is the philosophic or scientific way of looking at it. (opposite of “frame bound” where because the two statements elicit such different emotional reactions, they don’t technically “mean” the same thing )
Hedonometer: an imaginary instrument analogous to the devices used in weather-recording stations, which would measure the level of pleasure or pain that an individual experiences at any moment (term coined by cognitive psychologist Daniel Kanhneman)
The experiencing self: the self that answers the question “how does it feel now?” The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions
The Remembering self: the self that answers the question “How was it, on the whole?” The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. The remembering self composes stories and keeps them for future reference.
Duration Neglect: the psychological observation that people's judgments of the unpleasantness of painful experiences depend very little on the duration of those experiences
people have the intuition that someone dying at 35 after having lived a very happy life lived a “better life” than if the same person had lived an extra 5 years but those 5 years were only slightly happy)