Quotes About Thinking

Two Systems This book has described the workings of the mind as an uneasy interaction between two fictitious characters: the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2. You are now quite familiar with the personalities of the two systems and able to anticipate how they might respond in different situations.

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day.

rationality should be distinguished from intelligence. In his view, superficial or "lazy" thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a failure of rationality.

But System 2 is not merely an apologist for System 1; it also prevents many foolish thoughts and inappropriate impulses from overt expression.

coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.

the brain is a machine for jumping to conclusions

psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.

And it is natural for System 1 to generate overconfident judgments, because confidence, as we have seen, is determined by the coherence of the best story you can tell from the evidence at hand. Be warned: your intuitions will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.

System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives.

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Relying on causal thinking about a single case is a source of predictable errors. Taking the statistical view, which we will also call the outside view, is a way to avoid these errors.

the preference for causal thinking also contributes to the neglect of noise as a source of error, because noise is a fundamentally statistical notion.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed

The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.

on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1. In 1944, at about the same

Of course, not all slow thinking requires that form of intense concentration and effortful computation—I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos.

book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind

You may believe that you are subtler, more insightful, and more nuanced than the linear caricature of your thinking. But in fact, you are mostly noisier.

The associative machinery seeks causes. The difficulty we have with statistical regularities is that they call for a different approach. Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead. Nothing in particular caused it to be what it is—chance selected it from among its alternatives. Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.