Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman · 2011
Lindy Score
15 yrs
Age
11
Endorsers
Why it endured
Nobel laureate Kahneman's summary of decades of research on the two systems of human thought — the fast, automatic System 1 and the slow, deliberate System 2. The definitive guide to cognitive biases and how they shape our decisions. Already a modern classic.
What they're saying
11 people recommend this book
“Kahneman's masterpiece on human decision-making is essential reading for anyone who makes important decisions — which is everyone.”
GatesNotes
“Thinking, Fast and Slow should be required reading for every policymaker.”
Reading list
“Kahneman's work is the most important contribution to decision science since Pascal.”
“Thinking Fast and Slow should be required reading before anyone is allowed to make important decisions.”
“Essential for understanding the cognitive biases that prevent us from making rational decisions.”
“Kahneman's work on cognitive biases is essential for anyone making important decisions.”
A Year of Books
“Thinking Fast and Slow is the foundation of behavioral design. Everything Kahneman discovered applies to product development.”
Blog
“Kahneman fundamentally changed how I think about the hidden forces that drive our decisions.”
Interview
“I could not bring myself to finish this book. The book is filled with shady experiments on undergraduates and psychology grad students and wild extrapolations of the associated results. I find it exceedingly difficult to take many of the conclusions seriously. I can't read into them. I can't trust them. I can't base my decisions on them and I resist incorporating them into my world view with anything more than 0.01 weight. In fact, several of the experiments that this book mentions were also found to be not reproducible by a recent meta-study on reproducibility in psychology studies. Here's a characteristic example of me reading the book. The author says: "Consider the word EAT. Now fill in the blank in the following: SO_P. You were much more likely to fill in the blank with a U to make SOUP than with an A to make soap! How amazing. We call this phenomenon priming, system 1, something something". In fact, no, SOAP came to my mind immediately. All I could think about when I read this book is my own experience of participating in a friend's psychology study once. He designed an experiment and asked me to do some things and answer some questions, but at some point it became extremely clear to me what the experiment was about, or how he hoped I would behave. I went along with it, but I couldn't believe that this would eventually become part of a paper. It was a joke. I'm afraid you can't go through a similar experience and take these studies seriously from then on. All that being said I do find the broad strokes of the system1/system2 division proposed in this book to be interesting and appealing. A small few of the examples were fun to contemplate, and it was okay. 3/5, aborting reading. 3/5”
“One of Sam Altman's answers to 'What are some of the best books you recommend for a young startup founder?'”
“A landmark work on cognitive biases and decision-making that reveals the two systems driving our thinking—fast, intuitive System 1 and slow, deliberate System 2—with profound implications for every area of life.”
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