Reading About My Own Bad Decisions Between Tickets

Been chipping at this one for a couple months now, a few pages after close with whatever’s left in the walk-in sitting on my conscience. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for work he did with Amos Tversky, and this book reads like forty years and running of that research boiled down into one tome. System 1 is the fast, automatic guess, the line cook grabbing the pan before he’s decided to. System 2 is the slow, deliberate check, the one that’s supposed to catch him when he’s wrong. Most of the book is a long list of ways System 2 doesn’t show up for its shift.

I liked the early stretch a lot, anchoring, priming, the way a random number in your head can quietly move your estimate of something completely unrelated. Made me think about how I price specials, honestly, how much of that is instinct dressed up as judgment. Second half was harder to get through than the first, more statistics, more theory, my attention started sliding some nights where it hadn’t before.

You can read this in chunks, which matters when your reading windows are twenty minutes long and interrupted by dishes. Read the physical book though, there’s tables to refer to, and some of the ideas need more mulling over than you’d expect. This isn’t a self-help book, whatever the cover implies. Knowing about a bias doesn’t make it less likely you’ll fall for it anyway, that’s the whole joke, and Kahneman says as much himself. Guy explains the endowment effect, why owning a thing makes you value it more than getting an equal thing for free, and I caught myself doing exactly that with a knife set a week later.

Long, dense in spots, worth it if you actually finish it.