Tried With Fire

I'm still listening/reading Thinking Fast and Slow. I probably need to go back and read the book more slowly because almost every aspect of how we think gets tackled.  I just finished the section on the Illusion of Pundits in which the validity of so-called experts (political, economic, etc.) comes under scrutiny. They are not as expert as they think they are or we want to believe. In a study of pundits, Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, found out that: "experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large collection of excuses: they had been wrong only in their timing, an unforeseeable event had intervened, or they had been wrong but for the right reasons. Experts are just human in the end. They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not by what they believe, but by how they think, says Tetlock. He uses the terminology from Isaiah Berl...

I read books about thinking - not only what we think but why we think the way we do. I loved How to Think by Alan Jacobs, and when an author I like recommends other works, I'm interested in checking them out. One of his recommendations was Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman proposes that we have two systems that comprise our thinking. System 1 is the fast one. It's the system that kicks in when we jump to conclusions, know how to get through a sticky traffic situation without consciously being aware of what we are doing, and the source of intuition. System 2 is the slow one. This system requires far more mental energy and engages when we are in a situation that causes us to pause and deliberate. These systems have strengths and weaknesses and rely on one another at different times but not always in the best way. Because System 2 takes more effort, it is lazy and would sooner go along with the gut reaction of System 1. This only works w...