Thinking, Fast and Slow book
Decades of cognitive psychology research distilled into the System 1 / System 2 framework and the catalog of biases.
Decades of cognitive psychology research distilled into the System 1 / System 2 framework and the catalog of biases.
why it matters
The single most influential book on how humans actually make decisions vs how we think we do. Engineers especially benefit because the biases Kahneman documents are exactly the ones that show up in design reviews, estimation, and incident analysis. Once you've read it, you start noticing the patterns in yourself and others, which is the first step to correcting for them.
key ideas
- System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate) — most decisions are System 1; we just rationalize them with System 2
- Anchoring: arbitrary first numbers distort all subsequent estimates
- Availability heuristic: things easy to recall feel more frequent
- Loss aversion: losses hurt about 2x more than equivalent gains feel good
- Planning fallacy: we underestimate even when we know we underestimate
- Illusion of validity: feeling confident is uncorrelated with being correct
- Replacing the question: when a question is hard, we substitute an easier one without noticing
memorable framings
- 'Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.'
- 'Confidence is a feeling, not a measure of accuracy.'
who should read it
Every senior engineer. Long but worth it. Slow read; one chapter at a time, sitting with the implications.