Thinking: Fast and Slow Part 1

A quick glance at any place I write my personal things makes it obvious that I have an abundance of ideas to work on. For instance, my non-fiction book. I realized that I need to go back and make notes out of each book I will be using as a reference for it, to get a mastery of the subject and to deepen my understanding before writing about them in my own words. Since I've been more or less at a loss over what to write here, I thought it'd be exceedingly fruitful to do that now. 

Of course, it makes sense to go in reverse chronological order and re-learn the ones that are most fresh in my memory. Below are the notes I had already made on Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I shall try to go through them, remember where I left off, and then continue until I have a rough summary of the entire book. I understand that this entails a hefty amount of work, and so I've decided to do it in parts. With no further ado, let's get into it:

Firstly to understand the brain better we recognize that individuals (as in "in-divisible") are actually divisible, as our brains can be thought to function in terms of 2 distinct systems that can be characterised as such:

System 1 (Subconscious): The "Fast" thinking associative machine. Can read emotions instantly by watching faces, Jumps to conclusions, and searches for causal connections to create the most coherent story possible. It does this to make sense of the world intuitively and quickly allowing us to make quick decisions on the fly. Reacts quickly with gut feelings. Associative coherence. 

System 2 (Conscious): The "Slow" thinking lazy system, makes computations that require a lot of careful attention and mental effort. Has limited stamina and can slow down when running on fumes. Tends to follow the path of least resistance, always opting for cognitive ease, and taking as many shortcuts as possible to avoid mental fatigue. Pupils get dilated when being used, which made people look more attractive to the opposite sex in a study. Mathematics, comparisons, analysis, and other decisions that require you to hold data in your head while carrying out more calculations are examples of such thinking. Judges and teachers notoriously experience this fatigue causing debilitating effects in their decision making.

Rather than separate entities, these two systems influence and affect each other to form a single entity. The brain should be understood as such.

We are naturally wired to think in terms of cohesive stories that make sense, so much so that we are all natural storytellers, thinkers, makers, creators, collaborators, believers, and just as we make our stories, they make us.

I used to think stories were an art, a selective recreation of reality serving a purpose or another, with a potentially extraordinary transporting power to take us to any place imaginable. Now it seems that there is something so much more fundamental about it all.

The Illusion that the past is well understood and explained that it actually is causes the illusion that the future is more predictable than it actually is. It is important to keep room for the unknown information when looking to explain past events to be aware of how little it might actually be understood.

A person's confidence in a belief is often caused by the two related impressions of: Cognitive Ease and Coherence. When the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario.

Two basic conditions for the acquisition of skill :

• An environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable.
• An opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice.

• Priming
• Anchoring
• Regression to The Mean
• Law of Small Numbers
• Correlation ≠ Causality
• Substitution: replacing the answer for a harder question with a much easier one without realizing it. "How to fix Climate Change?" "Us small people can't fix such big issues ourselves!"
• Intensity Matching: "She is as tall as a foot long rat!"
• Representativeness: A constant need for causal stories causes sterotypes and cliches to dominate our intuitive thinking.
• Less Is More: Less information makes for a better story
• The Affect Heuristic: How something has affected you influences your judgement process. (Holding a pencil in between your teeth causes you to unconsciously feel like you are smiling, causing you to feel happier)
• The Halo Effect
• The Availability Heuristic: Things fresh in our memory are valued more and they influence our judgement.
• The Illusion of Validity
• The Illusion of Skill
• Cognitive ease and Coherence
• The Sunk-Cost Fallacy
• The Planning Fallacy: Overly Optimistic views. Based on intuitive coherence, the inside view, and the ignorance if the outside view.
• Optimistic Bias
• Baseline Predictions
• Framing Effects.