Maria Popova - The Anti-Gladwell: Kahneman's New Way to Think About Thinking

Nice article/review - I am really looking forward to getting to read Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Maria Popova wrote this for her blog, Brain Pickings, and it is published here by The Atlantic.

The Anti-Gladwell: Kahneman's New Way to Think About Thinking

By Maria Popova

Nov 1 2011

Legendary Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. A Nobel laureate and founding father of modern behavioral economics, his work has shaped how we think about human error, risk, judgement, decision-making, happiness, and more. For the past half-century, he has profoundly impacted the academy and the C-suite, but it wasn't until this month's highly anticipated release of his "intellectual memoir," Thinking, Fast and Slow, that Kahneman's extraordinary contribution to humanity's cerebral growth reached the mainstream -- in the best way possible.

Absorbingly articulate and infinitely intelligent, this "intellectual memoir" introduces what Kahneman calls the machinery of the mind -- the dual processor of the brain, divided into two distinct systems that dictate how we think and make decisions. One is fast, intuitive, reactive, and emotional. (If you've read Jonathan Haidt's excellent The Happiness Hypothesis, as you should have, this system maps roughly to the metaphor of the elephant.) The other is slow, deliberate, methodical, and rational. (That's Haidt's rider.)

The mind functions thanks to a delicate, intricate, sometimes difficult osmotic balance between the two systems, a push and pull responsible for both our most remarkable capabilities and our enduring flaws. From the role of optimism in entrepreneurship to the heuristics of happiness to our propensity for error, Kahneman covers an extraordinary scope of cognitive phenomena to reveal a complex and fallible yet, somehow comfortingly so, understandable machine we call consciousness.

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health.... [My aim is to] improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. --Daniel Kahneman

Among the book's most fascinating facets are the notions of the experiencing self and the remembering self, underpinning the fundamental duality of the human condition -- one voiceless and immersed in the moment, the other occupied with keeping score and learning from experience. Kahneman spoke of these two selves and the cognitive traps around them in his fantastic 2010 TED talk:

The word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things.

What's most enjoyable and compelling about Thinking, Fast and Slow is that it's so utterly, refreshingly anti-Gladwellian. There is nothing pop about Kahneman's psychology, no formulaic story arc, no beating you over the head with an artificial, buzzword-encrusted Big Idea. It's just the wisdom that comes from five decades of honest, rigorous scientific work, delivered humbly yet brilliantly, in a way that will forever change the way you think about thinking.


This post also appears on Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site.