Thinking, Fast and Slow...is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching ... Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does, however, supply a fascinating account of what might be taken to be its goal: happiness ... I overconfidently urge everyone to buy and read it.
... alarming, intellectually aerobic ... It is an outstanding book, distinguished by beauty and clarity of detail, precision of presentation and gentleness of manner. Its truths are open to all ... Some chapters are more taxing than others, but all are gratefully short, and none requires any special learning.
His book is partly an intellectual autobiography, with an affecting portrait of his collaboration with [his research partner] Tversky, and it’s enlivened with anecdotes drawn from his years in the Israeli army and advising the Israeli government ... a methodical march—a bit too much of a march—through what psychologists know about how the brain analyzes situations and retrieves information ... Persistent cognitive errors have profound philosophical and political implications, but Kahneman doesn’t spend much time on these ... these wider-view thoughts are left to a sketchy, 11-page concluding chapter.
He explains in lucid and provocative detail all the biases and heuristics that we are prone to; all the quirks and complexities that make the human species far different from the Homo Economicus of our economic textbooks. Overflowing with insights and endlessly fascinating, this book covers a wide range of topics and spans decades of pioneering work in the field of psychology ... This book succeeds in instilling an awareness of the many biases and heuristics that lead to errors of judgments and poor decision-making. It should be made required reading for anyone; economists, libertarians, or whoever, who still holds fast to the notion that people make decisions rationally. Above all, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a highly enjoyable and informative read for anyone wanting insight into the human mind.
... [a] masterwork on intuition and decision-making ... The book, a sweeping synthesis of Kahneman's research and thinking, offers plenty of...intellectual meat to be savored: observations on hapless stock pickers and overrated chief executives and an algorithm that predicts the future value of Bordeaux wines.
There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end ... one of the signal strengths of Thinking, Fast and Slow is to combine the positive and negative views of intuition into one coherent story ... this is one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman...now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them ... Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others...but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.
... a scintillating discussion ... Kahneman's primer adds to recent challenges to economic orthodoxies about rational actors and efficient markets; more than that, it's a lucid, marvelously readable guide to spotting—and correcting—our biased misunderstandings of the world.
