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Title: Thinking, Fast and Slow Authors: Daniel Kahneman Category:#books Number of Highlights: 41 Date: 2024-01-10 Last Highlighted: 2023-09-30
Highlights
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. (204)
Tags:#heuristics,#intuition,#problem_solving
The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. (334)
Tags:#perception
The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own. (406)
Tags:#favorite,#fallacy,#problem_solving
A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (System 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has. (424)
Tags:#writing,#knowledge,#learning
Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort. (599)
Note: Talking about walking
Tags:#cognition
Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation. (616)
Tags:#cognition,#temperance
The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort. Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs. (625)
Tags:#cognition,#temperance
Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. (628)
Tags:#cognition,#perception,#stress,#tasks
Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. (713)
Tags:#intelligence,#cognition,#memory
The famed psychologist Robert Zajonc dedicated much of his career to the study of the link between the repetition of an arbitrary stimulus and the mild affection that people eventually have for it. Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect. (1072)
Tags:#effect
The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System 1 has a long evolutionary history. (1098)
Note: Is this how repeated playlist help you achieve flow? A safe and familiar audio space.
Tags:#flow,#problem_solving
A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. (1115)
Tags:#cognition,#writing
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. (1122)
Tags:#intuition,#cognition,#problem_solving
The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future. (1160)
Note: I imagine a node network with many entry points. Paths are weighted as things happen repeatedly.
Tags:#cognition,#perception
System 1, which understands language, has access to norms of categories, which specify the range of plausible values as well as the most typical cases. (1219)
Note: This paired with the example of a large mouse and a small elephant explain how we keep ranges of normal.
Tags:#cognition
The two headlines look superficially like explanations of what happened in the market, but a statement that can explain two contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all. (1232)
Tags:#perception,#favorite,#fallacy
The observers know that there is no real physical contact, but they nevertheless have a powerful “illusion of causality.” If the second object starts moving instantly, they describe it as having been “launched” by the first. … We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1. (1250)
Tags:#fallacy
The perception of intention and emotion is irresistible; only people afflicted by autism do not experience it. (1259)
Note: Autism may help see through implied intention or emotion. Example is of a large triangle “bullying” a small one.
Tags:#autism,#cognition,#perception
The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls.” The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die. (1266)
Tags:#religion,#cognition
Gilbert proposed that understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it. (1319)
Note: Daniel Gilbert
Tags:#fallacy
In a later test of memory, the depleted participants ended up thinking that many of the false sentences were true. The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. (1327)
Tags:#cognition,#systems,#fallacy,#problem_solving
Intuitive predictions need to be corrected because they are not regressive and therefore are biased. (3192)
Tags:#bias,#intuition,#cognition,#favorite
This procedure is an approximation of the likely results of an appropriate statistical analysis. If successful, it will move you toward unbiased predictions, reasonable assessments of probability, and moderate predictions of numerical outcomes. The two procedures are intended to address the same bias: intuitive predictions tend to be overconfident and overly extreme. (3213)
Tags:#bias,#fallacy,#prediction,#cognition
In everyday language, we apply the word know only when what was known is true and can be shown to be true. We can know something only if it is both true and knowable. … It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion. … The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. (3326)
Tags:#knowledge
Many psychologists have studied what happens when people change their minds. … Asked to reconstruct their former beliefs, people retrieve their current ones instead—an instance of substitution—and many cannot believe that they ever felt differently. (3344)
Tags:#bias,#fallacy,#cognition
Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events. Baruch Fischhoff first demonstrated this “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, or hindsight bias, when he was a student in Jerusalem. (3349)
Tags:#cognition,#bias
Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions—and to an extreme reluctance to take risks. As malpractice litigation became more common, physicians changed their procedures in multiple ways: ordered more tests, referred more cases to specialists, applied conventional treatments even when they were unlikely to help. These actions protected the physicians more than they benefited the patients, creating the potential for conflicts of interest. Increased accountability is a mixed blessing. (3381)
Tags:#cognition,#health
Although hindsight and the outcome bias generally foster risk aversion, they also bring undeserved rewards to irresponsible risk seekers, such as a general or an entrepreneur who took a crazy gamble and won. Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. (3385)
Tags:#bias,#intuition,#cognition
The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need. (3390)
Tags:#perception,#cognition
Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages. (3433)
Tags:#knowledge,#luck,#statistics
I was so struck by the analogy that I coined a term for our experience: the illusion of validity. I had discovered my first cognitive illusion. (3504)
Tags:#cognition,#fallacy
Looking back, the most striking part of the story is that our knowledge of the general rule—that we could not predict—had no effect on our confidence in individual cases. (3512)
Tags:#confidence,#cognition,#problem_solving
It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. (3518)
Tags:#cognition,#confidence,#favorite
The results were unequivocally bad. On average, the shares that individual traders sold did better than those they bought, by a very substantial margin: 3.2 percentage points per year, above and beyond the significant costs of executing the two trades. (3544)
Tags:#finance,#perception,#cognition
Nevertheless, the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. (3565)
Tags:#cognition
They don’t believe that one big thing drives the march of history (for example, they are unlikely to accept the view that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the cold war by standing tall against the Soviet Union). Instead the foxes recognize that reality emerges from the interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes. It was the foxes who scored best in Tetlock’s study, although their performance was still very poor. But they are less likely than hedgehogs to be invited to participate in television debates. (3664)
Tags:#cognition,#perception,#problem_solving
Another reason for the inferiority of expert judgment is that humans are incorrigibly inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex information. When asked to evaluate the same information twice, they frequently give different answers. The extent of the inconsistency is often a matter of real concern. Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions. A study of 101 independent auditors who were asked to evaluate the reliability of internal corporate audits revealed a similar degree of inconsistency. A review of 41 separate studies of the reliability of judgments made by auditors, pathologists, psychologists, organizational managers, and other professionals suggests that this level of inconsistency is typical, even when a case is reevaluated within a few minutes. Unreliable judgments cannot be valid predictors of anything. (3739)
Tags:#judgment,#cognition
The widespread inconsistency is probably due to the extreme context dependency of System 1. We know from studies of priming that unnoticed stimuli in our environment have a substantial influence on our thoughts and actions. These influences fluctuate from moment to moment. … Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer. (3746)
Tags:#logic,#technology,#cognition,#knowledge,#algorithm
In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don’t want your result to be a negative number. The important conclusion from this research is that an algorithm that is constructed on the back of an envelope is often good enough to compete with an optimally weighted formula, and certainly good enough to outdo expert judgment. (3771)
Tags:#cognition,#algorithm
One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). (3781)
Tags:#algorithm
The big surprise to me was that the intuitive judgment that the interviewers summoned up in the “close your eyes” exercise also did very well, indeed just as well as the sum of the six specific ratings. I learned from this finding a lesson that I have never forgotten: intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits. I set a formula that gave the “close your eyes” evaluation the same weight as the sum of the six trait ratings. A more general lesson that I learned from this episode was do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either. (3871)
Tags:#prediction,#cognition