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Thinking, Fast & Slow" Audiobook by Daniel Kahneman Psychology, Cognitive Biases & Decision-Making

9:58:27 recording · AUTO · 1 speaker

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Brief overview

Two systems govern the mind: fast intuition usually serves us well, but its biases predictably mislead.

  1. Biases are systematic, so they can be namedErrors recur predictably in particular circumstances, and a label such as the halo effect makes a bias easier to anticipate, recognise and understand.
  2. Hard questions get swapped for easy onesThe executive who bought Ford stock answered do I like Ford cars instead of is Ford's stock underpriced, usually without noticing the substitution.
  3. Attention is a limited budget, and effort depletes itPupils dilate with mental load, half of viewers miss the gorilla while counting passes, and parole approvals fall from about 65 percent after a meal to near zero before the next one.
Executive Summary AI
  • The narrator sets his aim as enriching the vocabulary people use at the office water cooler to talk about judgments, choices and company policies, because errors are far easier to spot in others than in ourselves.
  • He traces the central ideas to 1969, when he invited Amos Tversky to a seminar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; their survey of expert participants showed even statisticians exaggerate how well small-sample results replicate, and their fourteen-year collaboration followed.
  • Using demonstrations such as Steve the meek and tidy soul, they showed people judge by resemblance and ignore base rates, although there are more than twenty male farmers for each male librarian in the United States, and they named the availability heuristic after judging category size by ease of recall.
  • Their 1979 prospect theory became a foundation of behavioral economics, and the collaboration was the reason for the Nobel Prize he received in 2002, which Amos would have shared had he not died, age 59, in 1996.
  • The book then casts mental life as System 1, which operates automatically and quickly with little effort, and System 2, which allocates attention to effortful activities but is lazy: pupil measurements track its effort, ego depletion and glucose alter its control, and more than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT and Princeton failed the bat-and-ball puzzle.
Key Quote
“Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
— Narrator
Key Quote
“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics.”
— Narrator
Key Quote
“The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.”
— Narrator