In the last few years two books took me FOREVER to get through. The first was Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and the second is Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." What caused this? What do they have in common? Both books explain, in minute detail, simple concepts with immensely far-reaching implications, and both have been... after the slog... the most intellectually rewarding reading of my adult life.

Where to begin... I have a number of theories running around in my head, and occ ...more

An unrelentingly tedious book that can be summed up as follows. We are irrationally prone to jump to conclusions based on rule-of-thumb shortcuts to actual reasoning, and in reliance on bad evidence, even though we have the capacity to think our way to better conclusions. But we're lazy, so we don't. We don't understand statistics, and if we did, we'd be more cautious in our judgments, and less prone to think highly of our own skill at judging probabilities and outcomes. Life not only is uncerta ...more

Hands down, one of the best books in its genre.

The book is a lengthy, self-conscious and a challenging read but highly recommended if you're interested in why human beings behave the way they behave. It's given me so much 'oh snap, so that's why we're so dumb' moments that at this point I don't even want to admit I'm a human to any space-time traveling race that comes in collision of 21st century Earth.

Citing behavioral research studies, he's convinced me that human confidence is a measure of w ...more

Often I find myself in conversations with people who are criminally opinionated, but have little in the way of empirical grounding. It’s common in these situations to hear them malign opponents of their views by reducing the conflict to a single factor; My opponent is so dumb they couldn’t hump a bacteria if they were a horny phage. Now, putting aside the fact that single factor analysis is a mugs game when discussing things of any complexity (which is basically everything), when resorting to th ...more

Daniel Kahneman is a Genius. But if you know his work, you know that already.

A Nobel Prize winner, his work is weighty and a bit recondite into the bargain. To help you decipher it into simple terms, I’m going to try to give you a Google-ised explanation, in bullet form:

We all live in a postmodernist world now. When we come of age into that scenario, many of us learn a bit of caution. Unless this brutal coming of age makes us hip and glib.

So there are two ways of thinking now. One is thinking fa ...more

It is very difficult to judge, review or analyze a book that basically challenges the very idea of human “Rationalism”. Are humans perfectly rational? This dude, Daniel Kahneman, got a Nobel Prize in Economics for saying they are not. An ordinary person might have been treated with glare or a stinging slap if he said that to someone’s face. We simply don’t like being told that we are not very rational and certainly not as intelligent as we think we are. Hidden in the depths of our consciousness, ...more

Whew! Wrestled this one down to the ground. It's got so much in it; I've got all I can for now. I'm leaving it out in the living room for now, though--for refreshers.

The author's aim is to prove to us that we are not rational beings to the extent we think we are, that evolution has seen to that. And that being the case, the book outlines what we need to know so as not to mess up decisions like we have been doing--like we all do.

And he's made it accessible. He pulls you in. You will get your sha ...more

Reading "Thinking, Fast, and Slow", ....(book choice for this month's local book club), was not exactly bedtime reading for me.

I had already pre- judged it before I started reading... ( certain I would discover I'm a FAST INTUITIVE - type thinker ... ( quick, often influenced by emotion). Once in awhile I use basic common sense - logic .... but even, it is usually with 'righteous emotions'. Just being honest!

I understand this is an intellectual -giant- of - a -book about "How we think"... Thinki ...more

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.