Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Review of Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman structures the problem of thinking--of reacting and reflecting--in a productive way. That said, there's something in every chapter I have an issue with, often with the author making the same mistakes he's warning us against--i.e. not considering a broad enough context to answer a question. In fairness, he admits that no one is immune from the problems of slow thinking's aggressiveness/fast thinking's passiveness (not his terminology). So any failure is evidence that that is right, but that doesn't let him off the hook. I'm also not impressed with the epithet "lazy" for "slow thinking." That's a moral judgment and unfair--though rhetorically useful. Else where he calls the "slow thinking" self the "I," the self we claim as our true self. If so, we are in our essence lazy. That may be. But the fact that we don't exert effort when there seems to be no reward for the effort sufficient to the effort could be called prudent or cautious. The sweeping moral judgment of "lazy" is lazy.