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The Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman lives in an airy penthouse on the 14th floor of an apartment block in downtown Manhattan, not far from the Eighth Street subway station. But never mind that for a moment. Instead, without thinking too hard about it, try answering the following question: roughly what percentage of the member states of the United Nations are in Africa? (I'll wait.)
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- by Daniel Kahneman
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- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
- Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
The correct figure isn't what's important here. What matters is that your answer is likely to be lower than if you had first been informed that Kahneman is 77 years old, or if I had claimed his apartment – where he lives with his wife, the British-born psychologist Ann Triesman – was 60 floors up, and near the 86th Street station. This is the phenomenon known as the "anchoring effect", and it is typical of Kahneman's contributions to psychology in that it suggests something rather disturbing about the human mind: not just that we're susceptible to making skewed judgments, but that we're influenced by factors more subtle and preposterous than we could ever imagine.
Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a meaty memoir of his life's work that describes countless such cognitive quirks – but don't imagine that reading it will cure your irrationality. "It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently,'" he says. "I've written this book, and I don't think differently." Kahneman, whom Steven Pinker calls "the most important psychologist alive", is twinkly and energetic. But beneath the surface, he is a pessimist. And he is allergic to the notion that his book might be mistaken for self-help. It's his first work aimed at a mass audience, and he hated writing it: "I really did not want to disgrace myself in front of my colleagues, and I worried the public wouldn't like it if it read like a textbook. Also, I really don't like old men's books, and I felt I was writing an old man's book." Eventually, in despair, he arranged to pay four younger psychologists $2,000 each to review his manuscript anonymously, and to tell him the brutal truth: should he bother finishing?
They liked it. So did I. It's hard not to: Kahneman's approach to psychology spurns heart-sinking tables and formulae in favour of short, intriguing questions that elegantly illustrate the ways our intuitions mislead us.
Take the famous "Linda question": Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that's logically impossible. (It can't be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the "conjunctive fallacy", whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's because Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, who died in 1999, are the primary inspiration for many of the past decade's pop-psychology books – the publishing phenomenon that brought you tipping points and freakonomics, the wisdom of crowds, black swans, and "predictable irrationality". It is a trend that one unimpressed reviewer of Kahneman's book labelled "the effect effect". In the early days, academics took a similarly sniffy view of Kahneman and Tversky's research: Kahneman recalls one well-known American philosopher turning his back on him at a party with the disdainful words: "I am not really interested in the psychology of stupidity." That soon changed, though, as the pair's influence spread rapidly throughout the social sciences, culminating in 2002, when Kahneman became one of a handful of non-economists to win the Nobel prize in economics.
"The psychology of stupidity" is not, in any case, a very apt summary. Kahneman's point isn't that we're all wildly bizarre or idiotic, but that our mental apparatus, which works so well most of the time, sometimes leads us astray in predictable ways. "We're beautiful devices," he says. "The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works."
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he presents this as a drama with two "characters": System One, which is the domain of intuitive responses, and System Two, the domain of conscious, effortful thought. System One – the kind of mental ability celebrated in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink – kicks in without our needing to think about it. The problem is that it always tries to help, even when it shouldn't, and that it works with whatever it's got, which isn't always the most sensible information.
The biggest challenge this posed was to economists, most of whom assumed that people were basically rational and selfish and acted in their own best interests. The work that won Kahneman the Nobel showed otherwise. For example, we hate losing things more than we like gaining them, which is why people refuse to sell their home for less than they paid, even if it makes financial sense to do so. Similar biases make us behave strangely where risk is involved, too: if forced to choose between being given £500 for certain, or a 50% chance of winning £1,000, most of us will opt for the sure thing. But if the choice is between losing £500 for sure, or a 50% chance of losing £1,000, most of us will take the gamble.
Then there's the much-cited thought experiment involving tickets to the theatre. Suppose a woman plans to buy a ticket for a play costing £40, but en route to the theatre she realises she has lost two £20 notes in the street: would she still buy the ticket? Most people, when asked this question, assume that she would. But what if she bought the ticket in advance, then arrived at the theatre to find she'd lost it? In that case, people assume she'd go home without buying another ticket – even though the scenarios are financially identical. As Richard Thaler, another leading light in the revolution that became known as behavioural economics, told an interviewer, Kahneman and Tversky's research meant that "rationality was fucked". Kahneman, on the other hand, likes to say that you'd need to study economics for years before you'd find his research surprising: it didn't surprise his mother at all.
Kahneman was born in 1934, the son of Lithuanian Jews, and grew up in France. Life was generally good until 1940, when German forces swept in. He recalls drawing, around that time, "what was probably the first graph I ever drew", showing his family's fortunes over time – "and around 1940 the curve crossed into the negative domain." His father was captured during a large-scale sweep of Jews in France, but somehow escaped being sent to a concentration camp and was let go instead. ("The story of my father's release, which I never fully understood, also involved a beautiful woman and a German general who loved her," he wrote.) The family kept moving across France. "The feeling was of being hunted," Kahneman recalls. At one point their home was a chicken coop at the back of a pub. In 1944 his father died of insufficiently treated diabetes, six weeks short of D-day. As soon as the war ended, his mother took the family to live in Palestine, in what would soon become Israel.
Kahneman was drafted into the Israeli army in 1955, where he served as an infantryman for a year – "it was a very tense time, but I never fired a shot in anger" – then worked as a military psychologist. One of his roles was to evaluate new recruits by watching them perform the "leaderless group challenge", in which teams of eight men had to transfer themselves, and a large log, over a 6ft-high wall, without anybody, or the log, touching the wall. The task was designed to reveal the participants' true character, and thus demonstrate who had the making of a future leader. As a method of psychological evaluation, it wasn't much good: Kahneman made predictions, but follow-up research revealed them to be little better than guesses. What the experience taught him, in the end, wasn't how to spot a future hero, but rather how hard it was to expunge his own confidence in his predictions. "We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses," he writes. "But we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid." Confidence is a feeling, not a logical conclusion reached after analysing statistics. Kahneman would later encounter the same phenomenon among investment advisers, who clung to their belief in their abilities even after it was demonstrated that their stock-picking skills left their clients no better off than rolling dice.
The intellectual relationship that defined his career began in the late 1960s at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, when he met Tversky, a young colleague. Kahneman describes their bond as "magical", and it sounds much more like a loving friendship than a scholarly collaboration. For several years, the two spent hours every afternoon in freewheeling conversations, examining their own hunches and intuitions, gradually developing the list of biases and fallacies for which they became famous. "He got up late, and I was a morning person, so we started with lunch, and took it from there," Kahneman remembers. "This kind of collaboration is very unusual in science. We were just extraordinarily lucky, and we knew it." The editor of the journal to which they submitted their first major paper rejected it; their work seemed too frivolous for the academic establishment. "Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments," Kahneman says. "The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point ... well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time."
With hindsight, however, those single questions seem anything but frivolous. The irrational traits they uncovered are, to pick one notable example, hugely important in understanding the causes of the current economic crisis, which has its roots in (among others) the overconfidence bias and the illusion of skill. If we can't hope to correct such biases in any lasting way, we can perhaps seek to cultivate some humility about the limits of our mental powers. Being the puppet of subtle psychological influences we cannot even recognise is annoying. But at least we can try to remember that that's what's likely to be happening. Well, it's a start.
Comments
14 November 2011 8:02PM
There is one way to overcome "overconfidence" and that is with uncertainty or doubt - part of my work involves looking ar market developments - doubt and uncertainty are very valuable correctives to over confidence. John Ralston Saul in Voltaires Batards's covered this issue rather well - perhaps he developed on the work of Prof Kahneman.
14 November 2011 8:03PM
Heres a related question to which I could do with an answer.
Is the broad agreement by the British public that austerity measures are necessary because the national debt needs to be repaid a form of mass hysteria ?
14 November 2011 8:11PM
Derren Brown got there first.
14 November 2011 8:11PM
Yes rvaucbns.
14 November 2011 8:12PM
No rvaucbns.
14 November 2011 8:12PM
Maybe rvaucbns.
14 November 2011 8:25PM
All this does is fuel more analysis by those least likely to change the situation and gives one more excuse to the mad bastards currently running the show. The people who need humility about the limits of their mental powers aren't humble people.
14 November 2011 8:26PM
Some women would. Some women wouldn't.
14 November 2011 8:28PM
I would have given him my opinion for nothing.
No.
14 November 2011 8:30PM
a) I'm not familiar with Kahneman's work and found this review helpful and pushing me towards his work; b) No scientific approach may be considered as the 'Holy Grall' for understanding and (even less for) changing human action but it may help lot at individual and group (or organization) levels. At a first sight it seems some similarities may be found with the works of Herbert Simon, or (nowadays) Nils Brunsson; c) It's difficult for humans not to try to find the usefulness of anything. It makes sense. Indeed, "we can perhaps seek to cultivate some humility about the limits of our mental powers". But how others will react upon? Mainly, on professional or political contexts, inside institutions (as State or Markets) will there be a reward or a sanction for? How to deal with, and change the fact that, others in general see humility as weakness?!
14 November 2011 8:42PM
Randomness is the nemesis of logic and rationality is forever trying to make sense of the insensible.
I often think that we undervalue our part in the random nature of the universe. As if we have no part or cause and everything that happens is always external, but that's not really true, is it.
I Like the story of the three ants who meet on the nose of a human and just after they finish boasting to each other about how they have navigated and understood all the plains and valleys of this wondrous new land, the human feels an itch on his nose, raises his hand and scratches the ants back into oblivion.
'Shit happens' as the saying goes...
14 November 2011 8:46PM
A lot of psychologists are ending up where the buddha was 2500 years ago.
The real problem is the illusion of an "I" that is rational.
In fact, people are made up of a whole series of flows of energy that just happen to us without being processed by any rational disciminating process and these include the flow of cultural ideas that are implicit for humans in objects and situations.
People attribute their successes and failures to their own ability but in fact our faculty of choice is tiny and in many people non existent.
The purpose of meditation in the path set out by the buddha is to control compulsive behaviour and enhance freedom. The idea that economic behaviour is rational is just one of those many self delusions that we suffer and something it is best to grow out of.
I think it was Goethe who said that no person is so enslaved as he who falsely believes he is free.
14 November 2011 9:08PM
Logic would tell us that slavishly paying back loans with interest is the path to eventual economic recovery, rationality would tell us that this is a good thing, a goal with a definable outcome. Randomness would tell us, just cancel all debt and start again. Buddhists are well known for the randomness of simply holding out a bowl and waiting, which one of these options is more likely to succeed?
14 November 2011 9:18PM
"In fact"? Prove it.
People choose what makes them feel best about themselves. People attribute their own successes (and other people's failures) to internal factors like their own ability. They attribute their failures and (other people's successes) to bad luck and other external factors (Weiner's attribution theory).
14 November 2011 9:21PM
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14 November 2011 9:23PM
This isn't logic it's fear.
This isn't random, it's an accepted form of begging in some eastern societies.
The only thing random here is your definition of the term "random". Randomness would tell us to take all the money we have left and use it to buy a giant potato.
14 November 2011 9:23PM
Anixia
What if we stick with a rational approach to the nature of moneyand publc debt if not to the individual economic decision making.
What if national debt was not debt at all but merely provision of money by the government that enables production of output and employment?
Do you think people actually understand money, how it is created, how it flows, how it is destroyed?
Why would they go for the austerity option if they don't ?
Why not err on the side of keeping people in jobs?
14 November 2011 9:24PM
No he didn't. Derren Brown got there afterwards. How long do you think it is since Derren Brown moved on from being a bog standard stage hypnotist? Mind Control was 2000.
14 November 2011 9:30PM
"In fact, people are made up of a whole series of flows of energy that just happen to us without being processed by any rational disciminating process..."
That may or may not be true. But if it is, so what? We certainly feel as though we are consciously in control of our actions: if I want to eat an apple, I can, and if I want to eat an orange instead, I can do that too. Maybe it was really all a matter of 'flows of energy', but to me it feels that I made a choice and carried it out. Isn't that ultimately all that matters?
Or, to put it another way: telling someone 'we don't really have free will, you can't choose anything' isn't of much use in helping them to decide what to do.
14 November 2011 9:44PM
Yup.
14 November 2011 9:57PM
...................the primary inspiration for many of the past decade's pop-psychology books
Because it is at source pop psychology. The approach is based on forcing you to make a choice on limited information or working to an arbitrary fixed protocol (eg officer selection for the IDF) and carefully phrased questioning. It does not accommodate the garnering of further information which is always an option in the real world. Go measure is a good dictum. Carrying on when the evidence suggests otherwise is the mark of the true believer.
"I've written this book, and I don't think differently."
This was evident from Kahneman's time as an army psychologist
Furthermore economic decision making is not always based on price but on value, which will change with time and circumstance.
For example, Look at question 2 in Burkeman’s accompanying article
The "endowment effect" is stated more simply as "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". Having the ticket is risk free as long as you don't lose it; dealing with punters on the internet may not be and selling may be more trouble than it’s worth. It also doesn't take account of the kudos of having a ticket for a sell-out concert, which obviously may enhance its perceived value, when you actually possess it and can show it to friends and colleagues.
14 November 2011 10:04PM
.
"cost the same" "same costs" "the same loss",
is the symptomatic of the unnecessary aggrandizement of the obviously obvious, ask his grandmother
14 November 2011 10:05PM
I have a feeling that not one single banker has ever read a book by Daniel Kahneman. As for " 'We're beautiful devices' " Who are the "We"?
14 November 2011 10:14PM
No that's your definition of random. Random does not necessarily mean obscure or extreme, logical or illogical, rational or irrational. The random aspect of buddhists logically waiting (begging) for food is that they have no idea when and if their bowls will be filled and with what (a pink alien perhaps? or a yummy curry?). It is logical, even rational for them to wait with bowls outstretched because they know it works but it is still random in terms of the outcome...
A random ie unexpected or unanticipated but logical reaction to massive world debt may simply be to cancel everyone's debt all at once, credit cards included, problem solved, only the rich lose and the other 99% can celebrate and build afresh (yes ,yes, I know jobs would go, economies deflated etc etc... but it is actually a viable alternate to saddling the whole world into austerity for decades just to keep a few 1% rich people happy with their interest payments. Which is more logical or rational, 99% suffer austerity and crippling poverty for decades versus just a few (1%) at the top of the tree losing their perch for awhile?
anyway, whatever... just saying, as the saying goes.
14 November 2011 10:34PM
yes, I agree mostly, The only point I'd make is that people do understand money, or rather the exchange of money in a micro economic sense. ie You have apples, I want apples, I have this thing called money that i got from making shoes. do you need shoes? no? well then I will give you money for your apples. etc... but even the top money makers and bankers don't seem to understand macro economics, 2 + 2 = 4 as long as we believe that 2 is really 2 and not already traded in the futures market as going to be worth 2.2 in ten years time. If we believe 2 = 4 or worse that 4 is only actually worth 2...
well... the end of the euro beckons... and politicians are sent into an irrational chaotic frenzy of printing more money... so 2 is now only worth 1.9 and falling. We made a system that even though we knew it was a maze with no end, we thought that by making it more and more complex we could fool ourselves into thinking there was actually a way out somewhere.. time to hit the reset button and learn from our mistakes.
14 November 2011 10:52PM
Who cares about all the economics, what was the percentage of African states and who was the American philosopher?!
14 November 2011 11:00PM
Good ATL
Respect to both Kahneman and Tversky, good stuff : ). As well as over lapping with Herb Simon's bounded rationality stuff (which it kinda does) it also has similarities to attribution theory (cf Heider). I always found it amusing that I got a better education at a poly than I would have had at the LSE.
14 November 2011 11:06PM
The financial crisis doesn't seem at all like an irrational act to me, on the surface maybe the financial institutions lost their money because of their brokers or whatever they are called acting irrationally and refusing to accept that they were terrible at their jobs etc as described
BUT
The shocking thing about the financial crisis isn't that these people are in fact incompetent, the shocking thing is that the supposedly democratic leaders of the rich countries decided after much deliberation to firstly allow them to get into the position where this would be a massive problem and then when it became a problem to throw public money at it
I don't buy that explanation for a second that it's just some big fuck up, what is happening is out and out theft. The people who are acting so 'irrationally' are moving this money into tax havens in saving schemes for public clients (who will never see the money again when the money is supposedly moved to service their debts) or simply by the massive salaries and bonuses
I don't agree with this idea that it is irrationally losing money it is stealing money (how rational that is is debatable....)
There was a reference to the pop-psychology book Freakanomics in here, I prefer that explanation of incentives,
14 November 2011 11:07PM
Pyschology is largely a pseudoscience for the twittering community. Just read some comments above. I hate it with a passion. ForThe first question about the UN I was thinking about did it mean founding members, then a sudden realisation that I had no idea of the current figure. I wasn't thinking about his f**king penthouse apartment even subconciously; another woolly psychology terrm. Sorry I didn't get any further in the article.
14 November 2011 11:18PM
It's because only a minority of the British public are actually state employees.
14 November 2011 11:41PM
It's interesting how this thread took a sharp turn away from the article itself and into the current economic crisis. I didn't actually mean to contribute to that, it does show how focused most people are on our current economic woes. Many of Kahneman's observations parallel our current personal psychology regarding economic issues. As Kahneman said, "We hate losing things more than we like gaining them". On top of that we both fear and yet welcome the random.
15 November 2011 12:34AM
1) I am not a device, beautiful or otherwise.
2) The creation of currency, the predication of economics on debt, and the fact that we stick with this made-up system 'just because' whilst simultaneously ruining our own habitat demonstrates that we, as a species, are fundamentally insane.
15 November 2011 12:38AM
What a shame this discussion thread went off on one about 'bread' man..Gutted ;-(
Anyhow, thought it was interesting how he's a pessimist, any others out there who'd describe themselves more as a glass 51% full "cynical optimist" or am I deluding myself and I am in fact a pessimist? Has his discovery and voyage into human behaviour created his pessimism?
15 November 2011 1:34AM
penileplethysmograph
You may have. But you don't have the snob value of an LSE degree - which again doesn't have the snob value of an Oxbridge degree.
The dominant perception is a degree from Oxbridge is substantially better than a degree from a poly. As if, you were studying physics at a non-Oxbridge university, the laws of physics would be different there, and not as good. The degree from the poly may in substance be much better - but if the dominant perception is, that it isn't, then the dominant perception is as good as rock solid reality. Because the majority of people live in La La Land, and it's impossible to convince them of anything else.
15 November 2011 1:56AM
Um...I think it's a tad more than "1%" of the population who would suffer in such a scenario.
It's odd how few people have remarked on the breathtaking presumption of the Occupy Wall St movement - no socio-political movement (even one as vague and ill-defined as OWS) can claim to represent 99% of the population - even Stalin/Mao/Pol Polt/Hitler/Kim Jong Il realised more than 1% of the population disagreed with them!
The fact that the OWS protests are not attended by more than a handful of activists demonstrates the truth of the above.
It is true that western economies are obscenely over-leveraged; but this does not mean credit in and of itself is evil - to take an innocuous example, its credit that allows a tradesperson to buy tools and a workvan and therefore exponentially increase their earning potential.
15 November 2011 2:09AM
194 countries in the world
53 of them in Africa
= 27.3%
(UNDP Human Development Report 2011)
15 November 2011 2:11AM
Actually I beg to differ. Behavioural economics (based on his work) is all the rage at the moment, and many of the big financial institutions are investing heavily in trying to get their people to understand the inherent biases in the work that they do and put in place checks and balances to put the brakes on crap decision making and judgments. With varying degrees of success.
Of course, many (all) of us like to tootle along believing that our decision are fact driven and rational - Kahneman's work exposes all that for the fiction that it is. I've been amazed for a long time that economics has got away with a model that assumes rationality in decision making, and that books like "The Undercover Economist" are greeted with such wide eyed acclaim. Psychologists could have/should have exploded that particular myth years ago.
15 November 2011 2:12AM
And it was complete and utter bollox. But something that whimsical "soft skill" types like. "Team building". "Leadership skills". "Bollox".
And it's the same for all the crap they do on the apprentice. Utter pointless balls.
Kahneman might have it wrong here. Investment advisers are well paid. Would it be in their interests to admit their picks were no better than random selection. They'd be out of a job. So, it makes perfect sense, and is perfectly rational from them to maintain the myth, that they actually have any skill at all.
The con in conman, stands for confidence. Without the confidence there can be no con.
Our whole society is structured like that. The "important" work that many people do is completely worthless.
As a whole people are completely and utterly stupid.
A company I worked for years ago. They spent 2 million to licence some software, that did nothing. The company selling it had some vague gibberish about what the software did - I couldn't understand it - anyway it didn't even vaguely do anything, The company's sales people must have been convincing - not too hard considering the "soft skills" flakes they were selling it too - my managers. My managers obviously didn't get any of the engineers employed by the company to look at the software - they would have instantly said it was a brick that did nothing. But engineers do not have "soft skills" - they're bad for "business", as Alan Sugar says. Managers who know nothing, but have "soft skills" can make better decisions based on their gut feelings - they think with their bellies. Engineers are incapable of making belly decisions. They would rudely scrutinise the functioning of a product, and be completely unimpressed by the smartness of the suit the salesman is wearing.
Anyway, after the first year of the licence, my bosses were so impressed by this software, they actually bought the company making it, for about 4 million.
And that is how the world works. The stupid float to the top, like chunks of fat filled excrement. They control the world, they make awful decisions, they are paid well, they wear smart clothes, drive smart cars, they have nice lives. Why upset a good thing.
Fat filled excrement.
15 November 2011 2:34AM
well, yes, but I think you might missing the point. People have genuinely convinced themselves that they have these skills.
Never doubt the power of self-deception.
Just have a look at some of Ben Goldacre's articles - particarly this one on facilitated communication
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/05/bad-science-ben-goldacre-column?INTCMP=SRCH
People had honestly convinced themselves that this nonsense worked - despite the fact that it does not stand up to a moments scrutiny.
15 November 2011 2:35AM
Muddled logic? You wouldn't expect the author of the book to be enlightened further by its content. You might expect a reader to form new opinions, if only to consider the author too smart for his own good.
The examples given here are overly simplistic. To draw conclusions from the answer misses the point , in that most people would form perfectly valid assumptions from the way the questions are framed.
This "conjunctive fallacy" is only our real world experiences telling us that there is usually an intellectually sound reason for asking the question in the first place.
15 November 2011 3:21AM
I read Khaneman and Tversky 20 years ago in grad school. Fascinating though somewhat dispiriting stuff. My distillation of them is that most people can think but often don't bother.
15 November 2011 4:03AM
"...Kahneman was drafted into the Israeli army in 1955, where he served as an infantryman for a year – "it was a very tense time, but I never fired a shot in anger..."
Anger or no anger he still fired. Everything else is suspect after that.
There is an alternative to warfare. We just need to exercise our .... logic.
15 November 2011 4:09AM
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15 November 2011 4:52AM
I lived for a while in a famous Buddhist temple near Zhengzhou, China.
They had a large ornamental bell with a tethered striker. Every so often, sitting in my room, I would hear this bell. I started to keep notes, to try and work out why the bell was struck and what it signified.
Sometimes it rang in the morning, so perhaps it was a call to prayer? But some days it rang in the evening, and some days it didn't ring at all.
Eventually, by persistent observation, I solved the problem. The bell was rung whenever some passer-by saw it and felt like ringing it.
15 November 2011 5:31AM
Kahnemann knew from experience in 1940s France about the awful randomness of being saved, as opposed to being rounded up and murdered, so that did tell him something unforgettable about how the world works.
I'll make a point of reading some of his books.
15 November 2011 5:48AM
I like this thinking..........
it makes so much sense ......
15 November 2011 6:13AM
How come the maybe got fewer votes than the yea or nay?
The author has something here
15 November 2011 6:46AM
I am no economist and have trouble balancing my budget. But I do no that the important thing about irrationality is that it is omnipresent, for me usually in the form of intuition. My work as an artist...composer and jazz performer is that we can have all the rational ability there is to read music, understand all the parameters but in the final sweep of the pen or the fingers on the keyboard or the flute, something takes over, we know what the next phrase or the next note of our improvisation is and we play or write it. Creatives go into "flow" where we lose sight of the world, time effectively stops and we do our best work amazed that what we though was 20 minutes was in fact 3 or 4 hours. I liked the comments earlier about the Buddha; creative "flow" is like, no it is a meditation when the rational mind take a back seat, so to speak, and the intuitive mind takes over. This is very important work that Kahneman has done; I have immediately ordered his book.
15 November 2011 6:49AM
Where would humanity be without irrationality?
We'd have no children; certainly in the West. The quantifiable costs are enormous, the rewards are intangible and largely emotional.
We'd have no culture. There's nothing rational in prefering this song to that one, this play /TV show /painting to the other. In the strict terms of rationality, all have the exact same value, so no- one would be motivated to create, or enjoy, anything new.
We'd have nothing to talk about; no differences of opinion, no individual insights. Because everything in the Universe would have a price- tag attached to it.
Irrationality is a great benefit, without which life wouldn't be worth living. But it is also, and always will be, a very poor guide to action and a very poor basis for belief.
15 November 2011 6:57AM
Is there anyone successful that Guardian comment posters do not hate?