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A review by dorothy_gale
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
3.0
I gave this book 3 stars because the author’s writing style (heavily academic) and length were not for me. It seemed textbook or college lecture-ish. I’ve talked to people who loved it, and the core ideas are unmistakably solid, so I do understand how it can get 4 or 5 stars.
This book was published in 2011, and it took me 10 listening days to get through it. I have read about 8 other books I’d consider psychology books, but this was the first with substantial statistics and economics angles. I chose it because I really wanted a good book on thinking and I was hoping for a mix of ‘explain how the brain works’ + practical how-to, with decision-making my key focus. This book was so long and had so much in it, it seemed as though the author was trying to document his life’s work in a single volume. It’s also not the type of book that fits an audio format well; it includes an 11-page PDF with 16 figures, and that’s hard to integrate while driving to work. He also uses MANY numerical examples and exercises, which is hard to track *safely* while driving. He does include a very good variety of examples, but they are often in case study, psychology experiment, and SAT-like scenarios that I wouldn’t necessarily classify as storytelling. The stories he does include are his journey at arriving at all his and his collaborators’ discoveries – and that just wasn’t that interesting to me. Decades-long research doesn’t occur to me as inspiring.
This concept-dense book proposes there are two main ways the brain works (hence the title), and includes several thinking errors and biases, but fails to consistently connect the main theme with the supporting details. In the audio version, his conclusion is only 13 minutes of the 20-hour book. Any recommendations get lost in the fray unless you are highlighting throughout the entire book as you go and write your own summary.
I’d assert this book is best for academics, researchers, and number lovers. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone interested in neuroscience and neuroeconomics specifically.
My key takeaways - Several definitions – too many in fact to remember so I had to go back to summaries to grab them: hindsight bias, loss aversion, endowment effect, “experiencing self” vs “remembering self,” associative activation, priming, “what you see is all there is” tendency, halo effect (which I had learned before in interview bias training), anchoring, regression to the mean, narrative fallacy, and there’s probably more. I think there are about a dozen biases total. My two REAL takeaways: (1) people need help making better judgments in their financial and life choices, and (2) an organization can operate with more methodical rationality than can the separate individuals within it.
This book was also my very first tests of the Kirkus “blue star” and Publishers Weekly “red star” ratings, and I learned that they can’t be trusted because they don’t publish the reviewers’ names or background. The reviewers could have been highly academic statisticians for all I know.
At the time of this review, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ has a Goodreads’ rating of 4.13 stars from 217,936 people – so clearly I’m a harsh grader – AND I suspect the vast majority read a paper version at a slower rate than I went through it.
This book was published in 2011, and it took me 10 listening days to get through it. I have read about 8 other books I’d consider psychology books, but this was the first with substantial statistics and economics angles. I chose it because I really wanted a good book on thinking and I was hoping for a mix of ‘explain how the brain works’ + practical how-to, with decision-making my key focus. This book was so long and had so much in it, it seemed as though the author was trying to document his life’s work in a single volume. It’s also not the type of book that fits an audio format well; it includes an 11-page PDF with 16 figures, and that’s hard to integrate while driving to work. He also uses MANY numerical examples and exercises, which is hard to track *safely* while driving. He does include a very good variety of examples, but they are often in case study, psychology experiment, and SAT-like scenarios that I wouldn’t necessarily classify as storytelling. The stories he does include are his journey at arriving at all his and his collaborators’ discoveries – and that just wasn’t that interesting to me. Decades-long research doesn’t occur to me as inspiring.
This concept-dense book proposes there are two main ways the brain works (hence the title), and includes several thinking errors and biases, but fails to consistently connect the main theme with the supporting details. In the audio version, his conclusion is only 13 minutes of the 20-hour book. Any recommendations get lost in the fray unless you are highlighting throughout the entire book as you go and write your own summary.
I’d assert this book is best for academics, researchers, and number lovers. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone interested in neuroscience and neuroeconomics specifically.
My key takeaways - Several definitions – too many in fact to remember so I had to go back to summaries to grab them: hindsight bias, loss aversion, endowment effect, “experiencing self” vs “remembering self,” associative activation, priming, “what you see is all there is” tendency, halo effect (which I had learned before in interview bias training), anchoring, regression to the mean, narrative fallacy, and there’s probably more. I think there are about a dozen biases total. My two REAL takeaways: (1) people need help making better judgments in their financial and life choices, and (2) an organization can operate with more methodical rationality than can the separate individuals within it.
This book was also my very first tests of the Kirkus “blue star” and Publishers Weekly “red star” ratings, and I learned that they can’t be trusted because they don’t publish the reviewers’ names or background. The reviewers could have been highly academic statisticians for all I know.
At the time of this review, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ has a Goodreads’ rating of 4.13 stars from 217,936 people – so clearly I’m a harsh grader – AND I suspect the vast majority read a paper version at a slower rate than I went through it.