Thinking fast and slow

is an excellent book by Daniel Kahneman (isbn 978-0-141-03357-0). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
The accurate intuition of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics.
It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other.
It is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.
A sentence is more easily understood if it describes what an agent does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.
You will find in the changing size of your pupils a faithful record of how hard you worked.
Cognitive strain is affected by both the current level of effort and the presence of unmet demands.
This quality of pastness is an illusion. The truth is, as Jacoby and many followers have shown, that the name David Stenbill will look more familiar when you see it because you will see it more clearly.
I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparantly generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which "knows" that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved.
Do the good feelings actually lead to intuitions of coherence? Yes, they do.
An important principle of skills training: rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.
Professional golfers putt more accurately for par than for a birdie.
A single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches. [Paul Rozin]
Our brains are not designed to reward generosity as reliably as they punish mistakes.
In addition to improving the emotional quality of life, the deliberate avoidance of exposure to short-term outcomes improves the quality of both decisions and outcomes.


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