June 2014: Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman)

Post date: Jun 22, 2014 11:1:29 PM

It was great to see MaryAnn recovered from her unfortunate fall and back in form, and lovely to welcome Hilary back to the East Bay, and to once again enjoy her charming Rockridge apartment at our June 19 book club meeting to discuss Daniel Kahneman's lengthy and somewhat difficult book about decision making. Only two of the six of us attending had made it all the way through, I believe.

Maggie was put off from the start because several of his little thought experiments designed to illustrate fast and slow thinking did not actually work for her (He kept saying 'You almost certainly chose option 1', but that's not what I thought at all!). Most of us found that our choices did usually match up with his expectations, however. We generally agreed that this book was a good follow on for last month's Blink, which we felt was a little too superficial, and left us somewhat unsatisfied. You certainly could not complain that this book was superficial, and he did a good job of talking through the experiments that supported various findings, many of which are concerning, if not downright disheartening. It is so easy to see how "framing" sets up the outcomes of political polling, and in general, learning how lazy our brains want to be is discouraging. We pondered how feasible it is to change ones way of thinking, and hoped that we will at least remember to stop and push ourselves to think in other ways when faced with important decisions. His money-and-odds problems were a bit off putting to some, although certainly did illustrate how we respond to various perceived levels of risk and potential rewards.

All in all, I think most of us were glad we had read it (or however much we had read), although it takes focused attention to do so.