I just finished an interesting book recommended to me by a friend in Nairobi after he read one of the posts here. I later discovered that another friend had previously recommended the book to me in 2013 when I’d added it to my wishlist. It’s ‘Thinking, fast and slow’, by Daniel Kahneman winner of the Noble prize for Economics.

The book is on the long side, but it reveals some interesting facets of human thinking, explaining how the brain works and how that causes us to make rather non-rational choices.

Here’s a quick summary of the various traps we fall into…
– We often form quick impressions/decisions (‘system 1’) but without the hard-thinking of ‘system 2’. We prefer system 1 because it requires a lot less effort, and we’re lazy thinkers.
– We like things that make sense (are coherent), and so we often impose a story on the world priming us to see certain things that aren’t there.
– When thoughts are easy to think, we tend to conclude they are more true. Things that are repeated seem more true, as does familiarity. Mood and ease of reading a text are also factors that make things seem more true.
– We have a tendency to impose causality and will even on events that are entirely random. This is a feature of system 1 which also struggles with statistics and probabilities.
– Our thinking makes jumps to conclusions that may not be justified.
– We often let our system 1 answer a different question to the one that is asked.
– We let system 1 assume that all that we perceive is all there is when understanding something.
– We struggle to cope with ‘regression to the mean’.
– So-called experts are often wrong in making predictions though we like gurus.
– We don’t take into account where we come from, which makes a huge difference to our appreciation of things like losing and gaining money. We accept high risks to avoid losses but prefer a sure outcome when it comes to gaining. We struggle to abandon losers and don’t forget about sunk costs. We sell shares that are doing well and keep hold of shares that are doing badly.
– Our experiencing self is very different from our remembering self. We can actually chose to repeat more painful experiences because our memories are skewered against duration, and weighted towards how the experience ended.

Reading the book certainly makes me more dubious about ‘explanations’, ‘evidence’ and learning lessons. I’ve caught myself internally asking more questions when people say that X undoubtedly happened because Y.