4 out of 4 stars
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Summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman by Nicholas Cross is a short and sweet unofficial summary of Daniel Kahneman's New York Times bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. Nicholas Cross with Books Made Easy takes the 528 page original and condenses it into only 54, nearly 10% of the size, and ends the book with a few questions to help put the ideas of the book to work.
The basic premise of thinking fast and slow is that the brain is broken into two systems - System 1 and System 2. System 1 thinks spontaneously, makes quick assumptions and "thinks fast" while System 2 is logical, ponders over things and "thinks slow". The book then focuses on 48 heuristics that deal with the way the two systems can interact and lead to issues, falsehoods and pitfalls in our everyday lives.
Nicholas breaks down the 38 chapters of the original, most of which are done in just a page or two. After the first few chapters set up the concept of fast and slow thinking, the rest focus on between 1-3 heuristics. Many of these are things we've dealt with in our lives, but now they've been given names. "The Availability Heuristic", for example, states that our own experiences make things seem more or less likely than they are. If you get mugged, for example, you're likely to believe muggings are more common than they really are. If a friend gets cancer you'll worry about it too, but the danger is that if no one you knows gets cancer you're likely to not worry about it yourself. "Availability Cascades" are similar but based on the news - if the news has lots of reports about gang violence, for example, then one is likely to believe they're far more likely than they actually are. "Ignoring Our Two Selves" explains why a fantastic day can be looked back upon as awful if only one bad thing happens, or how if thirty people tell you that you look great but one tells you that you look awful, you'll often believe the one bad comment over the thirty compliments. The "Sunk Cost Fallacy" was one I was aware of before the book thanks to Geoff Engelstein's Ludology podcast. The gist of it is that we have problems cutting our losses - if someone spends $100 on an item and hates it, they're likely to continue using it anyway to "get their money's worth".
What's fantastic about the book is that even though the chapters are so short and each discuss some rather complex concepts, they're expressed in an easy-to-follow, smooth way. I never had to go back and re-read things, and I almost always felt like I grasped the concept immediately. The use of examples in nearly all of the heuristics made it much easier, and it's really wild to consider how much the "fast thinking" part of our brain can be subconsciously affected by advertising, the news and other people.
While I had never heard of the original source book Thinking, Fast and Slow and certainly have never read it, I really enjoyed this summary. It's intended for use along with the original, but even without it I learned a great deal in an incredibly short amount of time, and a lot of it stuck with me. It also gave me a lot to think about in my daily life! The book was incredibly welcoming and anyone can easily dive in, spend an hour or two reading it and come out with their eyes opened to the perils of "thinking fast". My official rating is a very solid 4 out of 4 stars - aside from a few chapters needing a little more depth and examples the book was exceptional!
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Summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow
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