I have finally finished reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman, Daniel (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow). The book is about cognitive biases, i.e. systematic patterns of how humans behaviour deviates from optimal, fast intuitive vs slow analytical mind, and choices. The author's got a Nobel prize in economics and is a smart and trustworthy (science-wise) person overall.
I am not sure if knowledge from the book is useful enough to me. It was quite boring to read. Also a few early chapters talk about psychological effects which later turned out to be weaker or to work in a different way than it was thought. To be precise, I am talking about priming and ego depletion.
It is also popular among #lesswrong crowd.
@p the biggest criticism against this (and the #lesswrong crowd) was Aaron Swartz’s comment that the most important cognitive biases might not be the ones that Kahneman talks about.
Kahneman can only talk about biases that are easily measured in a lab. But more important to instrumental rationality would be biases of the sort “what is the most important thing I can be working on for my goals, and if I am not working on those things, why?”
@p I am ashamed to say that I have this book on my toread list. Haha.
PS: have you seen this? https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-the-most-important-idea-in-behavioral-decision-making-is-a-fallacy/
@cedricchin Yes, I've read that, and I've looked at the original paper https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1047 and hackernews comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689683. It is all very unclear, so I made only a small update towards "not everything is clear about loss aversion".
