Distilled: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author: Daniel Kahneman
“Changing one’s mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one’s mind for the worse about oneself is even harder.”
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
Review & Thoughts
Let me begin by mentioning that the first three sections of this book had me so intrigued that I had a hard time putting it down. So frequently was I struck by curveballs of psychological knowledge that I become dizzy with the implications of it all. I was even inspired to conduct psychological experiments on my peers, with astounding effect. My only gripe with this book concerns the last couple of sections, which take readers exceedingly far down some esoteric and nuanced rabbit holes of eccentric psychological theories which, while interesting and valuable, are simply not as exciting as the rest. With that said, 80% of the book is rich with incredibly useful — and sometimes disturbing — information backed by thorough studies and Kahneman’s decades of research and collaboration.
Not for the closed-minded, Thinking, Fast and Slow provokes frequent introspection, and will require you to change the way you view your own psychology. The information also has social applications, and will allow you to understand deeply the sources and causes of behaviors, biases, and thought processes you witness in others. You’d be wise to implement the heuristics you learn to discover more about yourself and those around you. You may start recognizing conflicts between your fictitious Systems 1 and 2, perceiving the effects of cognitive manipulators such as priming, anchoring, framing, and availability, and hopefully using your newly acquired knowledge to improve your life and that of those around you.
This book, if I may be so bold to say so, gives you superpowers. A solid grasp on these fundamental traits of human cognition will not only allow you to defend yourself against error and fallacy, but to decipher and influence the minds of others. These powers are already being used rampantly by the media, advertisers, and politicians, and usually not in the best interest of the subject. The task falls upon the reader to act as a counterbalance and a force of good, using these skills to help people rather than take advantage of them.
Most people do not want to redefine their sense of self, so spreading awareness in this area can be a difficult task — but subtle nudges in the right direction when the opportunities arise can have a cumulative effect over time. After all, Thinking, Fast and Slow mostly teaches us to talk about psychology, and is structured to facilitate this talk with pertinent vocabulary and real-world examples. If there is one thing to take away from this book, it is this: society, on the whole, needs to become more comfortable talking about psychology, and a little less attached to our perceived experiences and our sense of an infallible self. What you see is never all there is.
Rating: 8/10
Excerpts & Notes
Introduction
People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness.
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 Characters of the Story
You dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. [All too common in this era of smartphones.]
You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.
System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine — usually.
One further limitation of System 1 is that it cannot be turned off. If you are shown a word on the screen in a language you know, you will read it — unless your attention is totally focused elsewhere. [Same with judgements and predictions. You are making them constantly, and usually without cognizance.]
Attention and Effort
Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils off an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. [The harder you think, the bigger your pupils get. Cool! It’s called “cognitive pupillometry.”]
As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. [One of the most important takeaways from this chapter. This is the essence of “mastery.”]
One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure. [The fallacy of the multi-tasker.]
The Lazy Controller
Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. [This is why you usually struggle to perform under close supervision and scrutiny.]
The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. [You quite literally get very tired and fatigued after a lot of thinking. Very easy to notice after a long and heavy conversation, after which you will most likely feel grumpy or need a nap. If you value your energy, stop talking so much!]
The Associative Machine
You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware.
Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.
Cognitive Ease
Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. [The power of the media in a nutshell, and specifically why I avoid the “news.”]
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. [Lack of familiarity, or cognitive ease, with your vocabulary will do more harm than good for your listener. Use words that your audience can easily understand.]
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
[Interesting that being in a good mood strengthens System 1 and weakens System 2, and being in a bad mood performs the inverse. In a good mood you will be more intuitive, trusting, and creative. In a bad mood you will be more analytical, cautions, and critical.]
A Machine for Jumping To Conclusions
The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person — including things you have not observed — is known as the halo effect. [This is why people accept the whole package of a presidential candidate, or significant other, because of a small number of desirable qualities, completely disregarding anything contradictory to that belief.]
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.
[The easy examples are religion and politics, but these “stories” are being constructed all the time. When a person has a conclusion or belief based on limited information, they will resists new information because it could conflict with their established viewpoint.]
How Judgments Happen
Good mood and cognitive ease are the human equivalents of assessments of safety and familiarity. [When something “feels right” and doesn’t make us think too much, we tend to accept it as a sure thing. This is good news for salesmen and media pundits.]
The Law of Small Numbers
We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random. [Everybody likes to find causation and construct a nice story to explain away chance events. Sometimes a correlation can even seem glaringly obvious, and it takes an intelligent person to reject the story we are tempted to create.]
Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.
[Starting to realize that I frequently try to analyze the “cause” of things, most of which are probably pure chance.]
Availability, Emotion, and Risk
Frightening thoughts and images occur to us with particular ease, and thoughts of danger that are fluent and vivid exacerbate fear. [Finding it easy to conjure up images of horrible terrorist attacks and violent crime from the media? This ease of access to such thoughts will make the danger seem exponentially more significant than it truly is.]
The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?).
An inability to be guided by a ‘healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.
The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy. In the real world, of course, we often face painful tradeoffs between benefits and costs.
Tom W’s Specialty
There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated.
Linda: Less is More
When you specify a possible event in greater detail you can only lower its probability.
The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.
[Representativeness is basically the idea that something is more likely to be true if it more closely matches our concept of that thing, or matches our story. One might say of a bad president that he is likely to be impeached, but the probability of the actual event is actually incredibly low.]
Causes Trump Statistics
Some stereotypes are perniciously wrong, and hostile stereotyping can have dreadful consequences, but the psychological facts cannot be avoided: stereotypes, both correct and false, are how we think of categories.
The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments.
Even normal, decent people do not rush to help when they expect others to take on the unpleasantness of dealing with a seizure. And that means you, too. [This study was eye-opening.]
Changing one’s mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one’s mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. [Hard, but so necessary.]
The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.
Regression to the Mean
Regression effects are a common source of trouble in research, and experienced scientists develop a healthy fear of the trap of unwarranted causal inference. [Awesome example in this chapter was a story involving the advantages of positive versus negative reinforcement. A fighter pilot, when praised for exceptional performance, is very likely to do poorly next time. When chastised for poor performance, the pilot is likely to do much better. The assumption that the negative reinforcement is more effective is false, because the pilot is simply regressing away from the extreme poles of the spectrum of performance.]
The Illusion of Understanding
The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. [Refer to every “success story” ever for evidence of this.]
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness.
The Illusion of Validity
For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous — and it is also essential.
It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.
Many individual investors lose consistently by trading, an achievement that a dart-throwing chimp could not match. [A suitably dismal punishment for those who consider themselves clairvoyant.]
We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. [Dude, politics.]
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
People who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options.
You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices.
Intuitions vs. Formulas
The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a result of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is readily translated into a moral preference. [This is going to be extremely relevant in the era of self-driving cars.]
Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?
An expert player can understand a complex position at a glance, but it takes years to develop that level of ability. Studies of chess masters have shown that at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice (about 6 years of playing chess 5 hours a day) are required to attain the highest levels of performance. [Surely it must take much less time to master something of less complexity.]
It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.
[Main takeaway of this chapter is to always scrutinize expertise and intuition by the heuristic of regularity in the supposed expert’s learning environment. It is impossible to have this regularity in learning environments such as politics or the stock market.]
The Engine of Capitalism
The optimistic risk taking of entrepreneurs surely contributes to the economic dynamism of a capitalistic society, even if most risk takers end up disappointed.
An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality — but it is not what people and organizations want.
Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution. [People like answers, even if they are inevitably wrong.]
Bad Events
Gottman estimated that a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1. [Bad experiences are much more salient than good ones.]
Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains. [The essence of paycheck-to-paycheck living, and/or addiction to the comfort zone.]
Rare Events
People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events.
The probability of a rare event is most likely to be overestimated when the alternative is not fully specified. [If simply asked how likely you are to get in a car accident today, you would give a much higher probability than if asked how likely that is versus arriving at your destination with no incident. When the logical alternative is clearly conceptualized, you will balance the likelihoods much more accurately.]
The power of format creates opportunities for manipulation, which people with an axe to grind know how to exploit. [Seen a TV ad lately? How about a controversial documentary? If you hear something along the lines of “1 out of 100 people experience X,” you are being manipulated.]
Salience is enhanced byt mere mention of an event, by its vividness, and by the format in which probability is described.
The probability of a rare even will (often, not always) be overestimated, because of the confirmatory bias of memory. Thinking about that event, you try to make it true in your mind.
Keeping Score
Intense regret is what you experience when you can most easily imagine yourself doing something other than what you did.
Skeptics about rationality are not surprised. They are trained to be sensitive to the power of inconsequential factors as determinants of preference — my hope is that readers of this book have acquired this sensitivity.
Experienced Well-Being
In normal circumstances, however, we draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it. To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. [This is the premise behind mindfulness. It is nearly impossible to be exceptionally happy when not focused on the present moment.]
Few individuals can will themselves to have a sunnier disposition, but some may be able to arrange their lives to spend less of their day commuting, and more time doing things they enjoy with people they like.
Higher income brings with it higher satisfaction, well beyond the point at which it ceases to have any positive effect on experience.
Thinking About Life
Adaptation to a new situation, whether good or bad, consists in large part of thinking less and less about it. In that sense, most long-term circumstances of life, including paraplegia and marriage, are part-time states that one inhabits only when one attends to them. [Hedonic adaptation.]
Conclusions
A marker of skilled performance is the ability to deal with vast amounts of information swiftly and efficiently.
There is no simple way for System 2 to distinguish between a skilled and a heuristic response. Its only recourse is to slow down and attempt to construct an answer on its own, which it is reluctant to do because it is indolent.
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Distilled is an edition of the Side Effects blog that I publish upon completion of a new book. My reviews are an account of my personal, subjective experience of the book. I do my best to describe the impact it had on me, and any lessons I’ve taken away from it. The included excerpts and notes are sections that I highlighted and noted while reading, and represent what I feel to be the most poignant pieces of information. By publishing these reports here publicly, it is my hope that others will be able to receive the best of the knowledge and lessons from my literary journey.
