Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Selected Sections. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin.

• Chapter 1: the characters of the story
  • System 1: operates automatically and quickly and effortlessly
    • System 1 cannot be turned off (25)
  • System 2: with effortful mental activities and complex computations, involving agency, choice, and concentration (21)
    • System 2 needs attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away (22)
    • System 2 is mobilized when System 1 does not offer an answer (24)
  • focus on system 1:
    • “System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2” (21)
• Chapter 2: Attention and Effort
  • Kahneman’s book: Attention and Effort
  • attention and the changes in pupils
• Chapter 3: the Lazy Controller
  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: the study of “effortless attending”
  • “flow:” “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems” and the joy of that state is called an “optimal experience” (40)
    • So concentrated that they forget themselves and the surrounding settings.
  • 3 questions:
    • (1) bat and ball
    • (2) roses and flowers: the flower syllogism
    • (3) crimes in Michigan
    • Kahneman requests participants to answer with intuition:
      • “Do not try to solve it but listen to your intuition” (44)
      • “”
    • But he uses how students collaborate by following his requirement as their cognitive flaws. He discriminates them
      • 50% students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave incorrect answers; over 80% from less selective universities (45)
      • “People who say 10cents appear to be ardent followers of the law of least effort. People who avoid that answer appear to have more active minds.” (45)
      • “They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible” (45)
      • “Failing these minitests appears to be… a matter of insufficient motivation, not trying hard enough. Anyone who can be admitted to a good university is certainly able to reason through the first two questions…” (46)
      • “‘Lazy’ is a harsh judgement…but it does not seem to be unfair” (46)
    • Further, he evokes the research by Walter Mischel and University of Oregon to connect cognitive control with intelligence (47)
      • kids who can be resisters to Oreos were less likely to take drugs and have higher scores on tests of intelligence (47)
      • intelligence and the control of attention (47)
      • those who are prone to accept suggestions by System 1 are “impulsive, impatient, and keen to receive immediate gratification” (48)
      • Keith Stanovich: “superficial or ‘lazy’ thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a failure of rationality” (49)
    • All of the these are stigmatizations to the anything that is not logocentric. It stigmatizes the epistemological values in emotion and body. The narrative is full of neurodiscrimination and ableism
• Chapter 35: Two Selves
• Conclusions
  • Topics of the book
    • two characters: System 1 & System 2
    • two species: Econs & Humans
    • two selves: experiencing self (do the living) & remembering self (make decisions)
  • Two selves
    • remembering self: a construction of System 2
    • “duration neglect” and “peak-end” (in System 1), but they affect System 2’s decision (409)
    • the remembering self ignores the duration, and emphasizes peaks and ends
      • results: in favor of a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness
      • offer distorted reflections of actual experience
    • In contrast, “the duration-weighted conception of well-being” (409)
      • the remembering self (about what people want) and the experiencing self (about what actually happens) must both be considered
  • Econs and Humans
    • rationality:
      • not about whether reasonable
      • but about whether they are consistent (coherence)
      • freedom has a cost: because individuals make mistakes, and the society needs to help them
        • rational agents do not make mistakes, so for the economists of the Chicago school, freedom is free of charge (412)
    • normal choice vs the deviation from the normal
      • deviation from the normal: need more effortful deliberation
  • Two Systems
    • organizations are better than individuals when it comes to avoid errors, because organizations are slower