Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – A thorough journey into human mind

I would start my review on this book by a line from Steven D.Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics: [This book is] a lifetime’s worth of wisdom. Since its publication of 2011, Thinking, fast and slow has been located among best psychological books. The author, Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate for his contribution in psychological applications in economics.

Daniel Kahneman introduces to us two systems that administrate our mind. System 1 operates automatically and quickly with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.  In the meanwhile, System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities including complex computations […] choice, and concentration. In short, when you see this calculation 4 + 4, system 1 automatically works on it for the result of 8. With 12 x 26, system 1 immediately tells you that “No, I cannot make it without a pencil and a sheet of paper” while system 2 makes you sit down and work on this calculation. While your System 2 works on this multiplication, your pupils dilate. Your pupils contract when you get it done or you give up. You should bear in mind the difference of these two systems to go through the whole book.

Source: Yen Tran

As I consider this book as a channel to understand human’s thinking path, I would raise the questions that we mostly have in common. I believe that after all, you would agree with me that this book completes its role as a bridge of mysterious human mind and scientific knowledge in an extraordinary way.

What makes you believe in a story? The accuracy of that story? Not at all. We tend to believe in a story because of its consistency. The solid link among events contained in a story decides how persuasive it is to readers, not the reliability of each event. Let’s consider an example.[1]

Jerom died on February 13, 1996, ten days shy of his fourteenth birthday. The teenager was dull, bloated, depressed, sapped, anemic, and plagued by diarrhea. He was not in fresh air for eleven years. As a thirty-month-old infant, he had been intentionally infected with HIV virus SF2. At the age of four, he was infected with another HIV strain, LAV-1. A short of five, he was infected with yet third strain, NDK.

How do you feel right after reading the paragraph above? You might feel pathetic, angry and some of you might think of children in their miserable lives. Here is the rest of the story: Jerom is a laboratory chimpanzee. He is one of eleven great apes kept in the Chimpanzee Infectious Disease building of Emory University. You now feel less pity. System 1 leads you to emotional expression without your acknowledgement. You also make judgement right after reading the story without considering the facts in the story. In your judgement, Jerom was human. He was a miserable teenager who died at the age of fourteenth. For some reason, Jerom was infected with HIV on purpose when he was so little and this activity was crucial, guilty and unacceptable. System 2 which is in charge of doubts and unbelieving is sometimes busy, often lazy. Also, it always comes after System 1. When you are deep in emotion, System 2 is very weak. The next question will discuss about the case system 2 totally involves.

What do you really know about the meaning of probability? The book suggests an appealing experiment. On reading a research result that kidney cancer is higher in rural than in cities, what initially comes up to your mind? You automatically try reasoning for this result: People lack of medical service in rural; their daily diets are not nutritious enough; etc. Let’s change the condition: what if the study shows the opposite result that the incident of kidney cancer dominates in cities than in rural. You quickly think of the terrible situation of air pollution, water pollution and intense working atmosphere in cities. There might be something wrong here. One cannot reason it in both ways. The author suggests us another solution. The cases of kidney cancer in rural and cities are quite similar but the population in rural are much fewer than in cities which make the percentage of ill people in rural are higher. The author then sends questionnaires among researchers and experts asking about how they choose the sample size for their studies. The result shows that most of them take the sample size based their intuition instead of significant computation. Even experts make mistakes in their major. This arouses the question of whether human mind can take over statistics by nature. This experiment together with some other ones supports the supposition that even experts with long-time training are not sure about statistics.

These two questions are among a great number of questions that Thinking, fast and slow address the answers on. The outcomes from psychological experiments might surprise the readers. Throughout the book, by his whole-life wisdom, Kahneman points out various traps of our thinking and shows us the way to get out. If you are the one who always bear in mind the question of “Who am I?”, Thinking, fast and slow surely lightens your interesting adventure into human mind.

[1] The example from the book is long and quite complex. Instead, I quote this story from another book called “Who am I and if so, how many?” of Richard David Precht, Hachette UK, 2011.

YEN TRAN

*I would like to thank my partner – Tran Nguyen for her support. I owe a lot to my editor – Xuan Nguyen for helping me complete this review.

REPORT OF COCA-COLA CO. STOCK ANALYSIS AS OF JULY 9TH 2015

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REPORT OF COCA-COLA CO STOCK ANALYSIS as of July 9th 2015