machado de assis the posthumous memoirs of bras cubas

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Kahneman largely avoids jargon when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity.

The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) 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.

A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

Machado de assis the posthumous memoirs of bras cubas