Learning and growth
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Fast mind, slow mind
Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011 · Daniel Kahneman) — Fast mind, slow mind.
What actually happened?
Teaching flight instructors in the Israeli Air Force, he said that praise works better than punishment. A senior instructor objected from experience: praise a cadet for a clean manoeuvre and the next one is worse, shout at a bad one and the next is better. Kahneman saw that the man had been watching regression to the mean and reading it as cause. An unusually good or bad flight is partly luck, and luck does not repeat. He called it the most important insight of his life: the mind will not leave a fluctuation alone without attaching a reason to it.
Two systems, and one of them is lazy
The fast system answers almost everything and rarely reports difficulty. The slow one is expensive and avoids being started. The failure is not that the fast one errs. It is that the slow one signs off instead of checking.
A bat and ball cost a dollar ten, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. Almost everybody says ten cents. It is five.
Losses weigh about twice as much
Losing a hundred hurts roughly as much as winning two hundred pleases. It explains holding losers and selling winners, why you will lose this beats you could gain that, and why any reform meets more anger than gratitude.
The people who lose from a change turn up to say so. The people who gain are busy, and mostly do not know yet that they gained.
Anchoring, and where the first number came from
A number that arrives first shapes everything after it, even when it is plainly irrelevant. Opening offers, list prices before a discount, the tone set at the start of a review: one mechanism, used on purpose.
Ask what you would have estimated if you had never heard their figure. The distance between the two answers is the anchor.
The premortem
Plans get built from the inside, where this project is special, and ignore the base rate of comparable ones. The fix is to gather everybody before starting, assume it has already failed a year from now, and have each person write down why.
His own textbook team estimated two years. Comparable projects ran seven to ten, with heavy attrition. It took eight.
How do I use it today?
Put three gates in front of any decision that matters. Sleep on it, so the fast answer loses its heat. Run a premortem: it is a year later and this failed, so write down why. And look up how comparable attempts actually went before you explain why yours is different.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.
The mind will not leave a fluctuation without a cause attached.