Monday, March 5, 2012

Daniel Kahneman explains Fast and Slow to Charlie Rose

In a recent video interview, Daniel Kahneman explains "Thinking Fast and Slow", his latest book on behavioral psychology. If you've not listened to Kahneman before, this is a good opportunity.

This book, which we commented on already, is about the differences between thinking intuitively and thinking with purpose and analysis. The former is "system-1" fast thinking and the latter is "system-2" slow thinking.

One comparison that's been made is with Malcolm Gladwell's popular book "Blink". In Blink, Gladwell posits the idea of "thin slice" thinking, somewhat equivalent to Kahneman's 'system-1'. Both Gladwell and Kahneman say that intuition is often as good as it gets and that analysis can not improve on it.

However, Gladwell is a journalist for the New Yorker, and Kahneman is a Nobel laureate for his work in judgment and decision making. In the interview, cited above, Kahneman takes on Gladwell a bit, urging some caution in accepting Blink's thesis. However, it's evident that Kahneman respects Gladwell's ability to convey in the popular press some of these quite

A review of Blink is found here.

You might be interested in Jonah Lehrer's "How we think"