Thursday, December 6, 2012

Thinking Fast and Slow written by Daniel Kahneman (winner of the Nobel prize in economics)

To Think, or Not to Think. That is the question.

Kahneman's close examination of how people think and rely on their guts and/or forebrain to do their thinking for them. He shows fascinating examples of experiments on how people makes judgements, assess risks, bargain, negotiate; how logic get short-circuited by emotion and biases that we are sometimes not even aware of.

While the book describes many experiments and even gives the reader/listener a chance to vicariously experience what his subjects went through, it also has some practical value: 1. He briefly describes some countermeasures for eliminating "thinking errors" like jumping to conclusions or relying on an "availability heuristic" to determine the probability of an event; 2. And briefly describes some of the socio-political implications of this research can be used and abused.

I recommend this good read as a kind of primer for those wary of being influenced by corporate and government propaganda anywhere in the world. 

Overall it´s a good read but it took me some time to get through it. It´s not exactly a book you can read on the ferry from and to work. You actually have to sit down and study it and think about it. I´m a very fast reader and had to force myself to slow down a number of times to actually understand and absorb the context.

I´m gonna read it again in a few months even though it did not make it in my top 10 list.

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