Thinking, Fast and Slow - Intuition is NOT voodoo

#1
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/19936-Thinking-Fast-and-Slow
 

QFIT

Well-Known Member
#5
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

Well-Known Member
#6
Craps Master said:
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?:confused::whip:
 

sagefr0g

Well-Known Member
#7
QFIT said:
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

Well-Known Member
#8
sagefr0g said:
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?:confused::whip:
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

Well-Known Member
#9
Craps Master said:
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

Well-Known Member
#10
sagefr0g said:
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.
 

sagefr0g

Well-Known Member
#11
Gamblor said:
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.
yup, imho yer correct.............. i see it in myself in the casinos, errhhh i mean, me, i'm often trying to second guess luck, finding myself making excuses in my mind far as pulling the trigger on positive ev plays. gotta just make myself do it.
just me maybe, my guess is being paralyzed by indecision is how we get financial guys creating ponzi schemes, from how i understand it those types are often afraid to pull the trigger.:rolleyes:
 

blackriver

Well-Known Member
#12
sagefr0g said:
yup, imho yer correct.............. i see it in myself in the casinos, errhhh i mean, me, i'm often trying to second guess luck, finding myself making excuses in my mind far as pulling the trigger on positive ev plays. gotta just make myself do it.
just me maybe, my guess is being paralyzed by indecision is how we get financial guys creating ponzi schemes, from how i understand it those types are often afraid to pull the trigger.:rolleyes:
the best cure for a scared money is more studying and practicing. a thorough understanding of everything going on and devoting some time to creative visualization will make it much easier to pull the trigger. When you get rusty you will get rightfully scared again.

Also,i think a lot of people caught in ponzi schemes got there using both types of thinking, but the ones who dodged it either did the second type of thinking or they already put in the time and research like I suggested above that would shape their brain (and full it with crucial paradigms) such that when confronted with a ponzi they can dodge it with type 1 thinking.

many experts fool you by using type 1 thinking but it isn't innate, its from spending so many hours internalizing similar situations. The same way a poker/blackjack player of 10 years doesn't have to think about a lot of lower level things that newbies do, because theyve already been in and handled the situation or similar many times allowing them to internalize much of the decision process and focus on higher level things.
 

aslan

Well-Known Member
#13
Gamblor said:
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.
I recall a senior executive knocking down big government bucks who could never let a work project go. Her work box rose and rose and rose, nothing ever hitting her outbox. "If I make a decision and it is wrong, it will come back to haunt me. Ergo, I will not make a final ruling on anything." I wonder what the person who took her job did with all those unapproved items. lol She finally got the shaft for something unrelated. But her inaction did nothing to hurt her status. Nobody could point to anything that she approved that turned out wrong! That's because she did not have the courage to approve anything, and her timidity was amply rewarded. And let me make this clear, her job called for her input on work products until they achieved an acceptable level at which time decisions were made or rulings were issued. Her years of tenure yielded zero production. Either she was inept, or just afraid to act. Either way, she was totally unproductive, yet commanded a staggering salary. She pointed to the ineptness of those below her as the cause for low productivity. Nobody measured up to her standard of perfection. What a complete scam.
 
#14
aslan said:
I recall a senior executive knocking down big government bucks ... She pointed to the ineptness of those below her as the cause for low productivity. Nobody measured up to her standard of perfection. What a complete scam.
I like it! z:laugh:g
 
#16
QFIT said:
When I was at Citibank, they used to say that making quick decisions was better than making correct decisions. Worked for a while.
Surely you aren't going to hang your hat on some personal bias and subjective limited sampling?
 
#17
I have read this book and I must say that I have put much of what I learned into practice. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's research on heuristics and biases are something to be admired and they were admired. In fact, it led to a Nobel Prize. I first started putting my eager mind into what I had learned after just the first 100 pages. As a design engineer, I have always tried to seek perfection, but in the engineering world this is not possible. Instead of stressing over dialing into making something better, I decided to focus on reducing my errors. Focusing on my own biases, I started evaluating my daily routines and where I was making the most errors. I also noted specific times of day and what kind of errors I was making. Before long, I had fine tuned my work day by being aware of when to use 1 faction of my brain over the other. This being the fore-mentioned statistical vs the intuitive thinking factions. Genius!! I had paramount success with not only improving my work but it also and equally important, I was able to evaluate workers far better which led to knowing what kind of questions to ask certain people as some were simply more equipped based on the topic, but also on how to communicate with these people. In my office I had 1 manager that had this incredible memory and he relied heavily on it, and on the other side of the spectrum there was the guy people never took well to because he evaluated every decision and was often considered slow or annoying with his vocal thinking process. It was to no surprise why these two never liked one another, but I on the other hand had a great deal of respect because it was like having 2 living far left and far right factions right next to me at all times while the rest of us were living in the middle.

Later when I started my blackjack ventures as a new blackjack player turned card counter within a week of starting and learning basic strategy, I found that I was loosing a significant amount of money over time. I didnt understand why the math that I learned with counting wasn't confirmed with actual dollars. I first started controlling variables in my game such as play time among many others. When the wins started coming, I immediately realized that I might be able to put Fast and Slow Thinking practices into blackjack. Because I dont want to give away all the juicy details here as I plan on covering on my channel, I will keep this part short. I did experiments with my blackjack focusing on the heuristics and biases to reduce my errors which led to higher returns. Later while flipping thru a deck of cards I noticed I knew what the last card was...WHAT? How is this possible, I didnt have eidetic memory. I then started naming the last 2 and 3 cards with more practice. This was a game changer into how I understood how my mind was retaining information and how I was accessing it. This in turn led to experiments in how I taught myself to learn new material. The results of my individual studies and the studies of 2 other subjects have left me very happy and has led to my new blackjack system....the innovative approach to blackjack combined with counting.

It's not VOODOO!!! We use our intuition the majority of our day to get thru a day. Why in the %%%% would we ignore intuition when it comes to our money when its our most practiced asset?

Blackjack Innovator
 
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