Quotebook: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

In a new issue of Quotebook, let’s catch up with some ideas, tips, and handy knowledge on how human thinking works from the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This non-fiction book is devoted to the theme of thinking, intuition, rational and non-rational motivation, and other interesting aspects of how the human brain…

Quotebook: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

In a new issue of Quotebook, let’s catch up with some ideas, tips, and handy knowledge on how human thinking works from the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This non-fiction book is devoted to the theme of thinking, intuition, rational and non-rational motivation, and other interesting aspects of how the human brain works. Let’s look into some thoughts.

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Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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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.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?

(Daniel Kahneman)

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A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition”.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times. The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time. During the last ten years we have learned many new facts about happiness. But we have also learned that the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does. Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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