Thinking, Fast and Slow - Intuition is NOT voodoo

[zengrifter]

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Review by William Easterly / FT.com

Why even experts must rely on intuition and often get it wrong



There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end.

Kahneman presents our thinking process as consisting of two systems.

System 1 (Thinking Fast) is unconscious, intuitive and effort-free.

System 2 (Thinking Slow) is conscious, uses deductive reasoning and is an awful lot of work.

System 2 likes to think it is in charge but it’s really the irrepressible System 1 that runs the show. There is simply too much going on in our lives for System 2 to analyse everything. System 2 has to pick its moments with care; it is “lazy” out of necessity.

Books on this subject tend to emphasise the failings of System 1 intuition, creating an impression of vast human irrationality. Kahneman dislikes the word “irrationality” and one of the signal strengths of Thinking, Fast and Slow is to combine the positive and negative views of intuition into one coherent story. In Kahneman’s words, System 1 is “indeed the origin of much that we do wrong” but it is critical to understand that “it is also the origin of most of what we do right – which is most of what we do”.

The “marvels” of System 1 include an ability to recognise patterns in a fraction of a second, so that it will “automatically produce adequate solutions to challenges”. An even more remarkable accomplishment is “expert intuition”, in which after much practice a trained expert, such as a doctor or a firefighter, can unconsciously produce the right response to complex emergencies. The classic example is the firefighting captain who correctly anticipates that a house on fire is about to explode and gets his team out in time yet cannot articulate why he knew that.

MORE- http://www.zenzoneforum.com/threads/...-Fast-and-Slow

[sagefr0g]

should'a been posted in advanced strategies or math & theory, no?

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by sagefr0g

should'a been posted in advanced strategies or math & theory, no?

Yes... but not at THIS blackjack board! zg

[Craps Master]

Do a search on 'thinking fast and slow' at Amazon and check out the second title that appears. Writing advantage play?

[QFIT]

Simplistic logic and intuition have caused massive pain over millennia, not even counting gambler’s fallacies.

When I was at Citibank, they used to say that making quick decisions was better than making correct decisions. Worked for a while.

[sagefr0g]

Originally Posted by Craps Master

Do a search on 'thinking fast and slow' at Amazon and check out the second title that appears. Writing advantage play?

huh? i came up with Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels , some yap about psychology and words....so??
erhh am i thinking to slow or fast? whatever writing advantage, what am i missing?

[sagefr0g]

Originally Posted by QFIT

Simplistic logic and intuition have caused massive pain over millennia, not even counting gambler’s fallacies.

When I was at Citibank, they used to say that making quick decisions was better than making correct decisions. Worked for a while.

heh, heh, same thing my supervisor at work told me when i was breaking in, he'd tell me, when the sh!t hits the fan, make a decision, better to make a decision than do nothing. i was thinking, yeah it a'int gonna be yer a$$ that's in the sling, lol

[Craps Master]

Originally Posted by sagefr0g

huh? i came up with Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels , some yap about psychology and words....so??
erhh am i thinking to slow or fast? whatever writing advantage, what am i missing?

It's by a guy named "Karl Daniels" instead of Daniel Kahneman, and the title is similar. The publish date is also very close. I think this is clearly some guy who is trying to sell books to people who accidentally buy the wrong title.

[sagefr0g]

Originally Posted by Craps Master

It's by a guy named "Karl Daniels" instead of Daniel Kahneman, and the title is similar. The publish date is also very close. I think this is clearly some guy who is trying to sell books to people who accidentally buy the wrong title.

wow, i sure didn't catch that! lol
errhh a google search of Daniel Kahneman comes up with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman, so apparently the guy did write the book zg refers to.
interesting he has a paper on Belief in the law of small numbers", errhh i haven't read that.......
dunno about this Karl Daniels..........

[Gamblor]

Originally Posted by sagefr0g

heh, heh, same thing my supervisor at work told me when i was breaking in, he'd tell me, when the sh!t hits the fan, make a decision, better to make a decision than do nothing. i was thinking, yeah it a'int gonna be yer a$$ that's in the sling, lol

Your boss isn't completely wrong, might be more right than wrong. Having worked in the corporate world myself, too many people are paralyzed by indecision and are too risk averse.