Sunday 10 March 2013

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Are you fast or slow thinker? Wait a second, don't answer it yet. Why? Simply it's not an easy question :-o). To really understand the question and be able to grasp some hint-sights, let me introduce you to the book: Thinking, Fast and Slow.



It took me so long to finish this book, but I'm satisfied with what I've got from it. 


First of all, I believe this book is not for short-patient readers. Honestly, I got lost many times inside the jungle of given questions and analysis through-rough the book. I was required thinking a lot while reading it as well. Not just a pure list of facts to scan through,  the book asked for high concentrations. 

Second, if you think you can come up with a single answer for the question above after reading the book, you may change your mind a bit though. The book won't give you a unique answer; instead, it will guide you through reliable researches and experiments which lead to some aspects of the answer. You will determine which answer is yours. 

Third, I found myself agree with many findings from the book. A lot of them are somehow very "obvious" but never stated - kind of we all know but we don't know we know. Talking about my impression on the book, I was especially interested in some basic key terms defined and walked through in the book, such as more is less, WYSIATI, Muller-Lyer illusion, Halo Effect, loss averse and gamble seeking, heuristics, working memory, pupil of the eye reflection, anchoring effect, time pressure condition, pattern recognition, default selection, disgusting word effect, rhythm effect, smiling reaction, surprise indication, percentage v.s particular number, happiness measurement, regression to the mean, selling the winners phenomenon in stock market, cost is not loss... There are still more and more concepts that I cannot list them out here, yet they are all worth of reading. 

Finally, no matter you're a fast or slow thinker, there will be nothing wrong here. Our brain was preprogrammed to shortening time as much as possible for a solution. If you give the book a chance, you may realize that it's much more important to train ourselves to recognizing when our response tends to be wrong than trying to go with mistake free life.










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