Thinking, Fast and Slow is bursting with wisdom. Its subject is how we make decisions, the limits of our rationality, and how we experience events.
Kahneman seems to deride this great work as he finishes by saying this his book ‘…is oriented to critics and gossipers rather than to decision makers’. Yet this reflects his belief in our inability to be rational, and the modest beliefs in our peoples' logical consistency that has been forced upon him by conducting study after study in which people took masochistic decisions and sub-par gambles.
This is not a book about how to improve your decision making. Kahneman is clear that he does not think this is possible in a significant way, and acknowledges that despite being perhaps the world’s leading expert in decision-making, he is not much better than others when making decisions. Instead Thinking… aims to help us understand the common routes our minds take, to train us as observers. The implication of this ranges from the trivial: not trusting surveys about life satisfaction, to the critical: how we provision for critical illnesses.
For a book that is overwhelming with knowledge, Kahneman does a better job than I’ve seen anyone else do of presenting each consideration as a nugget of a chapter, with each chapter logically flowing into the next, and continuing from the previous.
Although I am upset and may struggle to acknowledge that my decision making is no better now, I think I will be slightly more humble in my decision making, and appreciative that the mental systems that lead me to poor decisions are also the basis behind many of the sound decisions that I take.