Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman ★★★★★

Justly considered a classic in its kind, this book is a must read if you are at least a tiny bit interested in how humans think.

Quotes

Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.

When the handsome and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, for example, you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments more favorably than he deserves. The availability of a diagnostic label for this bias—the halo effect—makes it easier to anticipate, recognize, and understand.

The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

[…] creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well.

We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.