Thinking, Fast and Slow

I started listening to this audiobook on February 2. It's a very dense book! I had to pace myself, often - relisten to certain parts. I've been with it for so long that it was really strange to finish it tonight, but I've got to say - it was worth it.

I want to get one thing out of the way - unless you listen to this book at home, where you can glance at the accompanying pdf any time it is mentioned, this is not a good book to listen to. It requires careful reading, often - stopping at thinking about a graph, or a thought experiment, suggested by the author. Then again, I might actually re-read the book in the future anyway.

I liked how Daniel Kahneman presents his ideas, how he gives us a lot of different stories and examples, makes us engage with the book. There were times he sounded a bit too critical of people for succumbing to biases they weren't aware of, but he also pointed out when he himself made common cognitive mistakes, which gives him a more genuine voice. More often than not, I found the book to be fascinating, making me think a lot about my own biases.

The book does have its flaws, however, and one of them is the fact that some of the studies Kahneman uses to justify his claims fell victim to the replication crisis (when it was discovered that a huge number studies were hard or even impossible to replicate). As Jason Collins states in his review

The first substantive chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow is on priming, so many of these studies are right up the front. These include the Florida effect, money priming, the idea that making a test harder to read can increase test results, and ego depletion (I touch on each of these in my recent talk at the Sydney Behavioural Economics and Behavioural Science Meetup).