Over-rated. As often the case, a really interesting central idea, explained in a ten thousand word essay, wrapped in several hundred pages of justification. ( )

A very good book, but not an easy book to read. This is in part because of the print size, which is miniscule. It has also to do, I feel, with the conclusions that the reader inevitably draws as they go through the text; namely, we are simply not as rational as we like to think we are. Still, it is a book that rewards persistence, and even aids it in one vital way (by breaking the text up into small sections). The accessibility of the writing style also helps counteract the aforementioned hindrances. Overall, well worth the read. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2012 about this read: "Interesting and educational. A bit long, but I guess that is fast thinking. Made MGA thinking about intuition vs. analysis, and the power of the "fast" part of brain to jump to (often wrong) conclusions." ( )

This novel was a solid read but was slightly let down by its long-winded commentary on unrelated topics and the insistence that economics expects rationality from humans. Yes, I got it the first time!
It is striking how much even slightly-well-off people will argue about the irrationality of the masses and how much 'thinking' instead of 'feeling' they are - only to expose themselves as hypocrites in the next five minutes of conversation. Thinking, Fast and Slow tells us why. It is heartening to find that it's possible to improve these facets of our personality to the point where we're not dictated solely by our intuition. In good news for pedants everywhere, Kahneman concludes that it's difficult, albeit doable, to spot yourself slipping into a hasty decision - but you can ask others to check if you're doing so.
The analogy of system 1 ('gut feeling') vs system 2 (rational, but lazy) and the experiencing self vs remembering self were remarkable psychological constructions, and I could see how Kahneman got his Nobel. All in all, this is not just a read for economists and psychologists - it should be essential reading for everyone if you can get past the verbiage. ( )

Our brains deal with the problems that confront us in daily life in two ways: the great bulk of them are handled by an associative, intuitive process that runs very fast and has a low energy cost, using a set of built-in heuristics to find the closest match to the problem we're confronted with in our memories of things that have happened before (rather like the way AI systems work, I suppose). Only when this level one system can't cope is the problem escalated to the much more costly mechanisms for rational, analytical processing of abstract ideas.

Back in 1969, the Israeli psychologist Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky spotted that while this is an efficient way to deal with straightforward things like finding food and avoiding lions, it can lead us into making illogical choices when we are confronted with some of the more subtle problems of modern life. Our brains are lazy and often don't switch on the level two system until it's too late, so we can end up going with our immediate, intuitive response without thinking things through. We jump to conclusions, constructing causality where there isn't any, we don't cope well with statistical concepts (even if we are trained in their use), we underestimate the role of chance, we allow ourselves to be influenced by irrelevant factors that are there in front of us and ignore the stuff we can't see in that moment, and we are far too confident in our own opinions, amongst other things.

Kahneman's ideas — which are not universally accepted — have stirred up most dust in economics, where of course it is heresy to suggest that the choices humans make are anything other than free, rational, and selfish. He spends a lot of time on how we assess the desirability of investments, bets, insurance, and the like, and the many ways we get that wrong. But the ideas apply to all kinds of other areas as well, of course. He talks about things like the difficulty of predicting future performance in recruitment and staff reporting, or about the problems with subjective perceptions of pain and pleasure in things like clinical tests and quality-of-life studies. Kahneman doesn't go into the way people can be deliberately manipulated by triggering intuitive responses, but that's there in the background as well, naturally.

As always for a lay person reading a psychology book, there's a tendency to dismiss a large chunk of it as "just common sense" and another large part as "weird stuff that could only happen in a psychology experiment, not in the real world". But still, there's a lot that I feel it would have been useful to know earlier in my life, and maybe even to apply in practice. (Of course, at the moments when it was most relevant I was probably working with professional psychologists who did know all this stuff anyway, but they never explained it so clearly...) ( )