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Is "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman really worth reading the whole book? I feel like I understand the phenomenon it describes (and I believe a page

Is "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman really worth reading the whole book? I feel like I understand the phenomenon it describes (and I believe a page or two is more than enough to explain it), I'm glad somebody described it popularly and attracted attention of wide audience raising their awareness. But reading a 500 pages book is a huge investment of time and mental energy. What's there one might find worth it?

gnarbarian 5y ago
I thought it was great. You might want to try the audiobook.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  I have no doubt it is great. And my life is not enough to read all the great books I want to, even if I were not ADHD, slow reader and generally overwhelmed. Why should I pick this one if I know what it is about already (and have in fact already started reading it once)? What will I find there that will make me feel glad I've actually read it? Can you come up with a curious quote from there perhaps? I mean a quote which a person understanding the concept can still find interesting.
  - gnarbarian 5y ago
    I also have ADD. (it took me 16 years to graduate college medicated.) This book is profoundly interesting and will give you many fun thought experiments and examples. This book sunk its teeth into me and I could not put it down. It's so much more than the basic concept You may already understand.
  - bloak 5y ago
    I read about a quarter of it and regret the time I wasted. It's interesting to look at the Amazon reviews: most of the reviews give 5 stars, but if you look at the 1-star reviews you'll see that there is a significant minority of reviewers with opinions like this one, for example: "It's an overrated book that is unnecessarily long. It will suffice to read the book blurb as the rest is repetitive explanation of the same topic with endless examples." To me it is an interesting psychological phenomenon that people find the book worth reading. Perhaps someone should write a book about that ...
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      > unnecessarily long... repetitive explanation of the same topic with endless examples. This is what I actually find most of even the best books to be. This is why I am asking (also because I believe most of the people here know what this book is about and many of them have actually read it).
Delk 5y ago
It's been years since I read it (and I didn't actually finish, but that's another story), so I might not remember things very well. I think some of the examples of bias or other cognitive misgivings that he gives throughout the book could be insightful by themselves. It might be easy to express a general idea in a couple of pages, but concrete examples of the phenomena help bridge it to real life. It could also be interesting as a quick peek at how some of the studies were designed and conducted. The problem for me is that, since at least some (perhaps many?) of the results Kahneman presents haven't actually been replicable, and I'm not an expert in the field, I have trouble figuring out which of them to believe and which, despite his convincing tone, might not be true after all. The blog post of the title doesn't actually seem to even mention the problems with replication at all even though they're moderately well known, which kind of makes me want to question whether the "must-read" list has been really considered that critically at all.
belter 5y ago
On "Thinking, Fast and Slow" you might want to run through this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261501
hntrowaway837 5y ago
I'm sorry if this goes against etiquette, but I would like to discuss with you a topic from one of your other comments here. My email is username at protonmail. Thank you and apologies for the disturbance.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
I started that book long before the controversy around the reproducibility of some of the sections was widely discussed in public. I got to the section on priming and immediately thought "what ridiculous bullshit", looked up the original paper and saw that my suspicions we absolutely justified. The statistical analysis of the results is garbage and the experiment design doesn't pass some basic sanity checks. If this were some sort of purely pop-psych book I would have just brushed it off. Journalists often have to write to a deadline and don't have to time to dive into the details of everything, especially if it makes a good story otherwise. However I was completely put off by the fact that this was written by someone who made understanding how we reason his life's work. In the book he even says something along the lines of "this sounds unbelievable but you have to accept it!" I felt somewhat validated that years later this became a more widely accepted criticism but the popularity of both that book and the unquestioned esteem that Kahneman commands really repulsed me. The biggest value of that book is as an object lesson on why we have a reproducibility crisis in the first place. If even prize winning economists/psychologists won't ask the most basic questions about what they're being told there's no hope for the field.
- unmole 5y ago
  This! The book really should have been subtitled The Ludic Fallacy Run Amok. Even putting the priming disaster aside, it's filled with grand generalisations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioural experiments. I find it mind boggling that so many otherwise intelligent people don't find anything wrong with it.
- honzzz 5y ago
  I have not read the book yet - would you please explain what about that priming section you did not like? Is it something specific that Kahneman says or the whole concept of priming? If it is the later, I would like to know what you critique, because I have always considered priming something obvious that I use to explain common life experiences without questioning it.
  - alok-g 5y ago
    Note: I have neither read the book, nor knew about this issue before. The following articles look relevant: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/ https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-... https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/ https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und... Per the following, not all types of priming are under controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)#Replicability_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)#Replicabi...
radu_floricica 5y ago
Yes, it is. On the other hand, I thought his most recent book, Noise, could have been a quarter of the size. Ended up skimming the last half and googling for cliff notes. I have no criticism on the topic - it's both useful and insightful. But way too verbose.
navait 5y ago
I read the whole thing and you're basically right. I enjoyed it still, but it's a book where you get 80% of the insghts in the first chapter. I also heard some of the expiriemtns mentioned in the book fell afoul of the replication crisis.
heroHACK17 5y ago
If, like me, you're interested in the subject matter of this book, I recommend reading The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis instead.
yboris 5y ago
I have often read books on topics I was already well-informed on. My philosophy is "think of it like a meditation". You might know very well about a psychological mechanism like the one described in Paradox of Choice (by Barry Schwartz) - you may have seen a TED talk and you already "get it". But it's rather different if you spent 10 hours of your life reading a variety of examples on the topic, and think about it (as you are reading it). The lesson sinks in far better - it is much more likely you will actually benefit from it.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  This comment may be one of the best arguments I've ever heard for reading the vast majority of business/big-idea books. That it's about the repetition of the ideas, reading them over and over and ingraining them. I love this idea and it may actually encourage me to read these books or even re-read them. I greatly appreciate this comment. Thank you.
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    Agreed
- loceng 5y ago
  You're increasing the spave out takes up in your mind and therefore the weight/importance of it.
- ChildOfChaos 5y ago
  Indeed. For me, I'd say reading the Summary is a good start to know if you want to read a book, but just because the basic idea is in that, I don't think it's all you need. I often find myself taking notes on different things than others have and linking it to other things in different ways. You need to fully understand the Why and although there is an argument that most books are only a few ideas, the stories in the book help argue why these are important an help you see how those ideas fit into the world and how they fit, something that is truly important if you are going to start implementing that idea or thought into your way of thinking, else it's just another article you read on wikipedia that you nod your head too. The human brain is all about patterns and connections and that is missed on a single article that is making a big point, a summary is exactly that, a good way to explain things in a simple and quick way, but you have to understand everything else behind it for you to truly understand it and for that you really need the whole book, unless you have a badly written book that fails to do this. I think this is vastly missed by those that just read summaries or dismiss the power of the whole book, just reading something doesn't really ingrain it into you, you have to wrestle and think about it in your own mind and being exposed to that idea from all different directions for a few hours really helps cement it. It's also why I am considering rereading books I liked, even though I still remember the basic ideas and due to what I mentioned earlier, I think you can take different things from the same book if you read it at different points in your life, different connections will happen and different points will make more sense than they did before.
meej 5y ago
I read it before the stuff about the replicability issues surfaced and got around 75% through it. There’s useful stuff in it but it’s too long and I quit because it started to feel like he was repeating himself. He needed a better editor. As I read it I wondered if his editor was too intimidated by his Nobel Prize to do their job well.
nofinator 5y ago
I highly recommend "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making" by Scott Plous. It's a concise, 260-page survey of all the research into cognitive biases. It cites a lot of other research than Kahneman/Tversky and gets right to the heart of the topic without being dry.
- alok-g 5y ago
  I note that it was published in 1993. Do you think it remains largely relevant given further research since then? https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Judgment-Decision-Making-McGraw-Hill-dp-0070504776/dp/0070504776/ https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Judgment-Decision-Making-M...
alok-g 5y ago
I feel exactly the same for many books. If a book summary on Wikipedia, etc., neither surprises me nor teaches me anything new, I have little motivation to read the book. There's an 'Ask HN' thread on "high signal to noise ratio" books: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102 I note that "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is also listed here. Wikipedia itself is of course lovely for high information density and is my go-to resource.

gnarbarian 5y ago

I thought it was great. You might want to try the audiobook.

qwerty456127 5y ago
I have no doubt it is great. And my life is not enough to read all the great books I want to, even if I were not ADHD, slow reader and generally overwhelmed. Why should I pick this one if I know what it is about already (and have in fact already started reading it once)? What will I find there that will make me feel glad I've actually read it? Can you come up with a curious quote from there perhaps? I mean a quote which a person understanding the concept can still find interesting.
- gnarbarian 5y ago
  I also have ADD. (it took me 16 years to graduate college medicated.) This book is profoundly interesting and will give you many fun thought experiments and examples. This book sunk its teeth into me and I could not put it down. It's so much more than the basic concept You may already understand.
- bloak 5y ago
  I read about a quarter of it and regret the time I wasted. It's interesting to look at the Amazon reviews: most of the reviews give 5 stars, but if you look at the 1-star reviews you'll see that there is a significant minority of reviewers with opinions like this one, for example: "It's an overrated book that is unnecessarily long. It will suffice to read the book blurb as the rest is repetitive explanation of the same topic with endless examples." To me it is an interesting psychological phenomenon that people find the book worth reading. Perhaps someone should write a book about that ...
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    > unnecessarily long... repetitive explanation of the same topic with endless examples. This is what I actually find most of even the best books to be. This is why I am asking (also because I believe most of the people here know what this book is about and many of them have actually read it).

Delk 5y ago

It's been years since I read it (and I didn't actually finish, but that's another story), so I might not remember things very well. I think some of the examples of bias or other cognitive misgivings that he gives throughout the book could be insightful by themselves. It might be easy to express a general idea in a couple of pages, but concrete examples of the phenomena help bridge it to real life. It could also be interesting as a quick peek at how some of the studies were designed and conducted. The problem for me is that, since at least some (perhaps many?) of the results Kahneman presents haven't actually been replicable, and I'm not an expert in the field, I have trouble figuring out which of them to believe and which, despite his convincing tone, might not be true after all. The blog post of the title doesn't actually seem to even mention the problems with replication at all even though they're moderately well known, which kind of makes me want to question whether the "must-read" list has been really considered that critically at all.

belter 5y ago

On "Thinking, Fast and Slow" you might want to run through this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261501

hntrowaway837 5y ago

I'm sorry if this goes against etiquette, but I would like to discuss with you a topic from one of your other comments here. My email is username at protonmail. Thank you and apologies for the disturbance.

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

I started that book long before the controversy around the reproducibility of some of the sections was widely discussed in public. I got to the section on priming and immediately thought "what ridiculous bullshit", looked up the original paper and saw that my suspicions we absolutely justified. The statistical analysis of the results is garbage and the experiment design doesn't pass some basic sanity checks. If this were some sort of purely pop-psych book I would have just brushed it off. Journalists often have to write to a deadline and don't have to time to dive into the details of everything, especially if it makes a good story otherwise. However I was completely put off by the fact that this was written by someone who made understanding how we reason his life's work. In the book he even says something along the lines of "this sounds unbelievable but you have to accept it!" I felt somewhat validated that years later this became a more widely accepted criticism but the popularity of both that book and the unquestioned esteem that Kahneman commands really repulsed me. The biggest value of that book is as an object lesson on why we have a reproducibility crisis in the first place. If even prize winning economists/psychologists won't ask the most basic questions about what they're being told there's no hope for the field.

unmole 5y ago
This! The book really should have been subtitled The Ludic Fallacy Run Amok. Even putting the priming disaster aside, it's filled with grand generalisations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioural experiments. I find it mind boggling that so many otherwise intelligent people don't find anything wrong with it.
honzzz 5y ago
I have not read the book yet - would you please explain what about that priming section you did not like? Is it something specific that Kahneman says or the whole concept of priming? If it is the later, I would like to know what you critique, because I have always considered priming something obvious that I use to explain common life experiences without questioning it.
- alok-g 5y ago
  Note: I have neither read the book, nor knew about this issue before. The following articles look relevant: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/ https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-... https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/ https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und... Per the following, not all types of priming are under controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)#Replicability_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)#Replicabi...

radu_floricica 5y ago

Yes, it is. On the other hand, I thought his most recent book, Noise, could have been a quarter of the size. Ended up skimming the last half and googling for cliff notes. I have no criticism on the topic - it's both useful and insightful. But way too verbose.

navait 5y ago

I read the whole thing and you're basically right. I enjoyed it still, but it's a book where you get 80% of the insghts in the first chapter. I also heard some of the expiriemtns mentioned in the book fell afoul of the replication crisis.

heroHACK17 5y ago

If, like me, you're interested in the subject matter of this book, I recommend reading The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis instead.

yboris 5y ago

I have often read books on topics I was already well-informed on. My philosophy is "think of it like a meditation". You might know very well about a psychological mechanism like the one described in Paradox of Choice (by Barry Schwartz) - you may have seen a TED talk and you already "get it". But it's rather different if you spent 10 hours of your life reading a variety of examples on the topic, and think about it (as you are reading it). The lesson sinks in far better - it is much more likely you will actually benefit from it.

jimkleiber 5y ago
This comment may be one of the best arguments I've ever heard for reading the vast majority of business/big-idea books. That it's about the repetition of the ideas, reading them over and over and ingraining them. I love this idea and it may actually encourage me to read these books or even re-read them. I greatly appreciate this comment. Thank you.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Agreed
loceng 5y ago
You're increasing the spave out takes up in your mind and therefore the weight/importance of it.
ChildOfChaos 5y ago
Indeed. For me, I'd say reading the Summary is a good start to know if you want to read a book, but just because the basic idea is in that, I don't think it's all you need. I often find myself taking notes on different things than others have and linking it to other things in different ways. You need to fully understand the Why and although there is an argument that most books are only a few ideas, the stories in the book help argue why these are important an help you see how those ideas fit into the world and how they fit, something that is truly important if you are going to start implementing that idea or thought into your way of thinking, else it's just another article you read on wikipedia that you nod your head too. The human brain is all about patterns and connections and that is missed on a single article that is making a big point, a summary is exactly that, a good way to explain things in a simple and quick way, but you have to understand everything else behind it for you to truly understand it and for that you really need the whole book, unless you have a badly written book that fails to do this. I think this is vastly missed by those that just read summaries or dismiss the power of the whole book, just reading something doesn't really ingrain it into you, you have to wrestle and think about it in your own mind and being exposed to that idea from all different directions for a few hours really helps cement it. It's also why I am considering rereading books I liked, even though I still remember the basic ideas and due to what I mentioned earlier, I think you can take different things from the same book if you read it at different points in your life, different connections will happen and different points will make more sense than they did before.

meej 5y ago

I read it before the stuff about the replicability issues surfaced and got around 75% through it. There’s useful stuff in it but it’s too long and I quit because it started to feel like he was repeating himself. He needed a better editor. As I read it I wondered if his editor was too intimidated by his Nobel Prize to do their job well.

nofinator 5y ago

I highly recommend "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making" by Scott Plous. It's a concise, 260-page survey of all the research into cognitive biases. It cites a lot of other research than Kahneman/Tversky and gets right to the heart of the topic without being dry.

alok-g 5y ago
I note that it was published in 1993. Do you think it remains largely relevant given further research since then? https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Judgment-Decision-Making-McGraw-Hill-dp-0070504776/dp/0070504776/ https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Judgment-Decision-Making-M...

alok-g 5y ago

I feel exactly the same for many books. If a book summary on Wikipedia, etc., neither surprises me nor teaches me anything new, I have little motivation to read the book. There's an 'Ask HN' thread on "high signal to noise ratio" books: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102 I note that "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is also listed here. Wikipedia itself is of course lovely for high information density and is my go-to resource.