“The people who make the most
difference to the lives of other people are very optimistic. They have an
illusion of control.”
— Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the
Nobel Prize in Economic sciences, explains the two systems that drive the way
we think.
The
characters of the story: Daniel Kahneman frames the way we think into two
different systems:
“Fast system—System 1, operates
automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are
often difficult to prevent.
e.g.
2+2=?
Biases
cannot always be avoided, because System
2—Slow System may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely error
are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and
effortful activity of System 2.
e.g.17x24=?
As
a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good,
and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would
be impossible tedious, and system 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve
as a substitute for system 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is
a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and
try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.”
A
machine for jumping to conclusions:
“The
great comedian Danny Kaye had a line that has stayed with me since my
adolescence. Speaking of a woman he dislikes, he says, ‘Her favorite position
is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.”
“Jumping
to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the
costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and
effort. Jumping to conclusion is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the
stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information. These are
the circumstances in which intuitive errors are probable, which may be
prevented by a deliberate intervention of System 2.”
How
judgments happen?
“There
is no limit to the number of questions you can answer, whether they are questions
someone else asks or questions you ask yourself. Nor is there a limit to the
number of attributes you can evaluate. You are capable of counting the number
of capital letters on this page, comparing the height of the windows of your
house to the one across the street, and assessing the political prospects of
your senator on a scale from excellent to disastrous. The questions are
addressed to System 2, which will direct attention and search memory to find
the answers.”
The
illusion of understanding:
“Narrative
fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the
world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are
concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and
intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened
rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient
event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causual narrative.”
“The
sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple,
predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has
understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control
the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we
would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties
of existence.”
Life
as a story:
“A
story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time
passing. Duration neglect is normal in a story, and the ending often defines
its character. The same core features appear in the rules of narratives and in
the memories of colonoscopies, vacations, and films. This is how the
remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future
reference.”
“Most
important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life
and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.”
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