![]() ![]() Well, this book is the Bruce Lee book of advanced self-defence. ![]() He means that Sociology allows you to defend yourself from those who would manipulate you. And this brings me to Bourdieu and him saying that Sociology is kind of martial art. And what makes it worse is that we are predictably bad at statistics. We (that is, we humans) are remarkably bad at mental statistics. The thing to remember is that while there is a law of large numbers - toss a coin often enough and in the very long run there will be as many heads turn up as tails - that isn't the case in the short run - where just about anything is possible. This is the sort of mistake we are all too prone to make. Still, when faced with a series of coin flips that run - H, H, H, H, H, T, H, H, H - it does feel like tails are 'due'. But I had no credibility - I'd already told him I never bet - so, how would I possibly know anything if I wasn't even brave enough to put my own money on the outcome? And didn't I understand the point of this story was he had already WON? I told him that coins don't remember the last throw and so the odds of getting a tail was still 50%, as it had previously been. Anyway, he told me he was playing two-up - an Australian betting game - and he realised something like tails hadn't come up frequently enough and so he started betting on tails and sure enough he made money. Years ago I was talking to a guy who liked to bet. It's because we think we know stuff that this comes as a constant surprise to us. You need to read this book - but what is particularly good about it is that you come away from it knowing we really are remarkably easy to fool. Hundreds of people have already told all this guy's best stories in their own books - but all the same it is a pleasure to hear them again by the guy that first said, 'this parrot is dead' or rather, 'framing effects make fools of us all'. Well, if you had never seen an episode of Monty Python and your entire experience of their work was via the interpretation of men of a certain age down the pub - then finally getting to see an episode of the original would be much the same effect as reading this book. I suspect, although there is no way to prove this now, obviously, that Osama bin Laden could do the Silly Walk like a natural. It is impossible to have lived at any time since the late 60s and not have had some socially dysfunctional male reprise the entire Parrot sketch or Spanish Inquisition sketch at you at some stage in your life. That wouldn't mean you wouldn't know anything about Monty Python. I want you to imagine something - say you had spent your entire life and never actually seen an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. I was thinking that perhaps the best way to explain those other books would be to compare them to Monty Python. And the best part of it is that this is the guy (or, at least one half of the two guys) who came up with these ideas in the first place. For example, you could avoid having to read, Sway, Blink, Nudge and probably a dozen or so other books on Behavioural Economics. Reading this book means not having to read so many others. ![]() Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives-and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation-each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.Įngaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities-and also the faults and biases-of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. ![]()
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