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essentialsaltesThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Nonfiction look at how humans make decisions... mostly badly. Kahneman has a Nobel Prize in Economics and here he lays out a rough chronology of the work that he and others have done in his area. He posits, with pretty good evidence, that there are two systems. A fast, intuitive system that is error prone. What's that? A snake! Jump away! Oh, it was just a stick. And a slow, more logical and evidence based system. If you use the slow system on every long skinny thing in your path, you may wind up dead, so the fast approach also has value.
There's a lot of good stuff here about mistakes and biases in thinking. Some of it I'm pretty familiar with from skeptical literature, but here he puts together a lot of the key experiments that demonstrate the phenomena.
Later, it bogs down a bit for me as it moves a bit too much into economics. There are a lot of literally irrational choices people make when evaluating potential gains and losses, but I don't personally find it that interesting, although I think his explanatory theories make sense. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and maybe that's why people might prefer a 100% chance of winning $50 over a 90% chance of winning $100.
You Dreamed of Empire Álvaro Enrigue
A quasi not-quite historical take on the meeting between Cortez and Moctezuma and the characters around them. I appreciated some of the characters and the pre-Columbian setting, but overall I didn't find this as compelling or humorous as others seem to.
Nonfiction look at how humans make decisions... mostly badly. Kahneman has a Nobel Prize in Economics and here he lays out a rough chronology of the work that he and others have done in his area. He posits, with pretty good evidence, that there are two systems. A fast, intuitive system that is error prone. What's that? A snake! Jump away! Oh, it was just a stick. And a slow, more logical and evidence based system. If you use the slow system on every long skinny thing in your path, you may wind up dead, so the fast approach also has value.
There's a lot of good stuff here about mistakes and biases in thinking. Some of it I'm pretty familiar with from skeptical literature, but here he puts together a lot of the key experiments that demonstrate the phenomena.
Later, it bogs down a bit for me as it moves a bit too much into economics. There are a lot of literally irrational choices people make when evaluating potential gains and losses, but I don't personally find it that interesting, although I think his explanatory theories make sense. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and maybe that's why people might prefer a 100% chance of winning $50 over a 90% chance of winning $100.
You Dreamed of Empire Álvaro Enrigue
A quasi not-quite historical take on the meeting between Cortez and Moctezuma and the characters around them. I appreciated some of the characters and the pre-Columbian setting, but overall I didn't find this as compelling or humorous as others seem to.
