Thinking, Fast and Slow

i brought this with me on our winter vacation, which was good since at times you really need a distraction free environment to appreciate what kahneman is pushing you through. kahneman lays out all sorts of interesting hacks/shortcuts that our minds take to arrive at “good enough” conclusions while showing that there are all sorts of interesting inherent biases that we need to be aware of. well, made aware of if we want to insure that we’re thinking about the problems that we run into appropriately.

kahneman nicely breaks things down into his 2 systems approach. system 1 thinking is immediate, intuitive and close enough for many things, but easily glosses over things to come to the wrong conclusions. system 2 thinking (the slower, more deliberative) requires that you stop and actually burn some serious glucose to get to the “right” conclusions. a significant hunk of the book is dedicated to these systems and their impacts on our behavior and conclusions. each chapter concludes with snippets/examples highlighting when you might be seeing interactions or behaviors which exhibit the modality described in the previous chapter.

i’ll be honest, this book started out strong and engaging, but about 2/3s of the way through i was really having to motivate myself to complete it. it was a bit of a slog and it felt like there was a lot of repetition. there was some very interesting discussion in that slog around management and perceptions of risk and economics. so it is ultimately worth the slog, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like it at the time.

totally worth the read and the effort expended.