📣 Curious Quotes from the Author
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect.
“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”
“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
“we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”
“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”
“I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.”
“The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”
“A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:
Thinking, Fast and Slow demonstrates that our minds have two systems. The first operates naturally and with little effort, but the second is more deliberate and demands much more of our attention. Our thoughts and actions change depending on which of the two systems has control of our brain at the time.
Repeat the message!
Messages become more persuasive when we see them frequently. This is most likely because we evolved in such a way that frequent exposure to items with no negative repercussions appeared to be fundamentally beneficial.
Do not be swayed by uncommon statistical incidents that are over-reported in newspapers.
🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry
The book talks about 2 systems of thinking we hold within ourselves. The auto reactionary thinking we do and the less impulsive more analytical thinking we do.
What is really telling is that both types of thinking are vital in our Tech Careers. When stuff is hitting the fan and we need solutions now, that auto brain takes over and we’re remarkably calm.
But we can get into a state of overanalyzing everything and not getting any true useful work done. We need both to survive, and we need both to thrive.
🤝Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:
How can you commit to something enough to be able to make better decisions?