This week’s book is “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. This book explains so much about the way we think and the fallacies we make because we let ourselves believe in our “fast mind.” Our slow thinking is our more intellectual, logical thought process that is required when you do a math problem. Of course, these are just theoretical thinking minds, and they actually don’t exist. But for this book, it’s a great analogy for understanding Dr. Kahneman’s research over the last few decades.
I really can’t explain every single study of this book, but Derek Sivers has written some great notes on it. That is a great primer for what’s in store.
Updates 2012-12-30
There’s just so much in this book that’s just is almost eye-opening. But it’s not that the research is ground-breaking, but more of a matter of summarizing Kahneman’s work in the field with Amos and putting it in perspective of our lives. And it takes a long time to get through for some reason (the language isn’t that dense).
Updates 2015-02-09
I’ll call him the Godfather of modern pop psychology because he work brought about a slew of other psychologists you hear at the top of their field. This book cleared up the concept of loss aversion, anchoring, and our two modes of thinking. I find myself going back to this book again and again to clear up some very core concepts in rational and irrational thinking. In the appendix of the book is Kahneman and his collaborator’s (Amos Tversky) seminal paper on prospect theory that won them the nobel memorial prize in Economics.