Recently Pi Wen ordered Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow. After it sat around for a week I picked it up, and now can't put it down. I'm halfway through, so this assessment is provisional.
Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, for work he completed with his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky. As David Brooks pointed out when Thinking came out, Kahneman and Tversky caused a revolution in understanding of how we think.
The main premise of Thinking is that we each have two mental "systems." System 1 is automatic, fast, associative, and prone to error. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and cautious. System 1 is easy, system 2 is hard. Ideally system 2 would check system 1's excesses, but-alas-system 2 is "lazy." In many cases it simply endorses the biases and preconceptions of system 1.
To really check ourselves we must be very deliberate. Find people we disagree with. Make sure we're not giving in to the availability of easy-to-accept-but-hard-to-justify arguments. This is exhausting but rewarding work, whenever we manage to pull it off. This isn't often. But all humans are in the same boat.
Kahneman also points out, with many examples, the limits of expertise. For example, stock picking is no better than random coin flipping, even by seasoned advisors. Simple statististical formulas better predict a student's success in college than in-depth interviews with a guidance counselor. Innovative management stratategies may have some impact in improving a company's position in the market, but much less than commonly believed. The world is mostly random and ummangeable, even though we all develop our own explanatory narratives to seek order.
This is all very disconcerting. Of course there's been a backlash. One of Kahneman's friendliest antagonists is Gary Klein, who studies naturalistic decision making. Where Kahneman is skeptical about the mind's limits, Klein is optimistic about the mind's strength. Kahneman downplays the power of intuition, Klein sees its potential. They recently set out to see where they agreed and where they disagreed, resulting in a harmonious collaboration even if they could not bridge the gap entirely.
As ever, much more work remains to be done. Kahneman: "The line that separates the possibly predictable future from the unpredictable distant future remains to be drawn." David Brooks predicts that Kahneman and Tversky will still be lionized centuries from now. Maybe. But Kahneman himself would surely state that that time-scale is part of the "unpredictable distant future." In general all we can deal with is what's right before our eyes, even while knowing that this is not all there is.
Reminds me of one of my friend Lonnie's favorite quotes: "A moment's thought would have shown him his error -- but thought is difficult, and a moment is a long time."
Posted by: T Scott | May 08, 2012 at 05:51 AM