Review of Thinking Fast and Slow

Book Link: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08RZ4PTSF/

This was and interesting read for me because on one hand, I felt that some of the examples and studies provided in the book were interesting and new to me. On the other hand, the conclusions and proposed changes to your life/work from the author were mostly redundant from other business-focused books I've read so I don't know that I had many new takeaways from it. It is possible that the main content of the book has already been distilled into the various trainings and processes at work, and even therapy sessions outside of work, so the impact of reading it myself isn't large. It was interesting reading this through the current political lens though, the line about "When System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted" shows perfectly the strategy of extremist views. "Flood the zone with shit" is doing this to occupy peoples System 2 trying to debunk and debate while giving them reptitive messaging that sticks more effectively while in that state.

I would recommend it to others ramping up in this space for work or to better understand how to the mind works, but I would also say be liberal with how you skip and scan sections of it.

Some highlights from my reading: 1. The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: 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. 1. 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. 1. Most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word. 1. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own. 1. Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other. People who do well on these tests tend to do well on tests of general intelligence. However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; 1. People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” 1. People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. 1. The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: 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. 1. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. 1. The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. 1. Hearing a speaker when you are in a good mood, or even when you have a pencil stuck crosswise in your mouth to make you “smile,” also induces cognitive ease. 1. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. 1. Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!” 1. when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted. 1. Todorov has found that people judge competence by combining the two dimensions of strength and trustworthiness. 1. George Pólya included substitution in his classic How to Solve It: “If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.” 1. “To the untrained eye,” Feller remarks, “randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.” 1. Damasio and his colleagues have observed that people who do not display the appropriate emotions before they decide, sometimes because of brain damage, also have an impaired ability to make good decisions. An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw. 1. The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant. Amos and I introduced the idea of a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison. 1. People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed. 1. Success = talent + luck, great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck