Thinking fast Thinking Slow

The following are notes from the book "Thinking fast Thinking Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. The part added in italics is added by me.

More self-control at young age means more ability to excel at the tests of intelligence later in life.

System 2 is a kind of supervisor.

People, who dislike thinking or analytics, resort to quick or first answer that comes to their mind. In a state of ego depletion too, a normal person can do so. An operator in a manufacturing plant for example, is usually tired and can't be expected to rational thinking, so he must resort to standard operating procedure. A company like ExxonMobil knows well that people who have relatively lower intelligence means they have lesser self-control and hence cannot be expected to use deeper, analytical thinking in the time of crisis. Therefore, it is a must to give them a standard procedure which does the thinking for them.

High intelligence does not make people immune to biases.

Priming effect. We would tend to fill up so_p as soup after hearing EAT while soap after hearing WASH.

Stay calm and kind and you are likely to be rewarded.

Money primed people are more selfish and are less willing to help confused and needy people.

Idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others and to accept demands from others.

Out of hundred, only a few shall be primed and act as desired by the primer- usually a leader, a corporate head, or a parent. But a few percent are sufficient to win an election.

A vastness about a word or name or concept.

Complex language is an indicator of low intelligence.

Aphorisms that rhyme look more credible. Rhyming suggest a magical truism about them. If they weren’t magical, they wouldn’t rhyme.

In good mood, people lose the control of System 2 over performance, become more susceptible to errors and become more intuitive. They make more logical errors.

Sadness, vigilance, suspicion and analytical approach and increased effort also go together.

Good feelings lead to intuitions of coherence.

When you are in good mood, be extra careful as system 2 is weaker.

Haw many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?

The question is accepted as a valid one since animals and ark puts us into the biblical context and we forget that it was Noah who took the animals.

So, a question may be: Whom did Roger Federer beat in the 2012 US open final? The question may take us to tennis grand slams and we know that Federer has won many of those and instead of thinking or paying attention to whether he really beat someone in final (was he there in that final?) we start exploring the player who was defeated. But if we say who Donald Trump beat in the finals...

All headlines satisfy our need for coherence: a large event is supposed to have consequences, and consequences need to explain them.

We see causality as clearly as we see colour.

The concepts of causality were shaped separately by evolutionary forces, building the origins of religions in system 1.

Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to be normal.

Make sure we do not focus on the average but consider the entire range of normal reactions.

When we look back at our lives, we can't simply accept luck to be a driving force. We need a causal story.

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the cost of occasional mistake is acceptable and the jump saves some time and effort.

The sequence in which we come to know the characteristics of a person can depend on chance and thus can influence our judgement. 

The first question in a test paper often sets the tone.

The wisdom of crowds

The story of both arguing parties must be heard impartially before giving a judgement.

Framing effects: the odds of surviving after one month of surgery are 90% is more reassuring than mortality within one month of surgery is 10 %.

95 % fat free or 5 % fat – recall how a product is marketed.

More information from independent assessments is necessary.

Sometimes we don't want more information to spoil our story.

How many birds do you want to save- 2000, 20,000 or 200,000? When asked this question, participant contributed a similar number for all three numbers of birds since the image of a helpless bird soaked in oil was the defining image rather than the number of birds.

Not only we automatically assess people as attractive or unattractive, but it also influences us.

The punishment won't feel right until it matches the intensity of the crime.

Heuristic means a simple procedure to find adequate although imperfect answers to difficult questions.

Now here is the understanding.

If the target question is how happy you are going to be in six months from now, you’ll first judge what your mood is now - which is the heuristic question. It has solved the target question which was not only hypothetical but tough too.

So, to answer a tough question like how happy you are these days, use a simpler question first like how many holidays you have had in the last year. If you ask question 1 first you won't link it with holidays but if question 2 was asked first, you'll simply use your answer to that as an input to the question 1.

The present state of affairs looms very large when people evaluate their happiness. However gory the past maybe, we tend to forget that and link our present and future happiness with the present.

During the selection process, the question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Interviewers must forget the short performance during the interview which may be affected by several “noise factors” like upset stomach or a recent fight with a close friend. Instead, stretch the imagination, put the person in the job and visualise if she or he can succeed.

If we like the project, we think the costs are low and benefits are high due to affect heuristic.

Large samples are more precise than small samples.

Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do.

Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck. Around 50% chance of failure to prove their hypothesis.

Always look at the sample size.

German targets in WWII were random but appeared as if to save their spies.

There is no such thing as form or hot hand in basketball- it is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion. What about a batsman hitting boundaries? Is it an illusion or a reality? It does seem that he is more likely to hit but, he can get out on the next delivery.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

The law of small numbers.

Small schools are not only best but also worst. Why? Because of the size tend to be variable. A research found that out of the 1662 schools in Pennsylvania, 6 of the top 50 were small schools. Bill Gates foundation was encouraged to provide funding to create smaller schools. However, small schools also are the worst.  The large schools tend to be better, especially at higher stages since they provide wider scope of courses.

Any number that you are asked to consider as a possible solution to a problem will induce an anchoring effect.

China's population is 500 million. What do think is Indonesia’s population?

Well if you send the judge a proposal initially, say a demand of 50,000 dollars, he is in way anchored to it and then the final decision may turn out to be closer to this number. It is a clever strategy.

Therefore, do not plan anything with a number in terms of revenue, later it can be a source of disappointment. That is, if you are looking for a settlement.

Availability heuristic. If you happen to see a car accident, you’ll believe their number to be higher than others. If it happens to you, you’ll believe in this even more.

If a judgement goes against you, your faith in justice will be shaken though you must have read or seen such events happening to others.

Political scandals and secret marriages among movie stars have a greater availability bias. Similarly, theft, rape and molestation incidents seem to be more than their actual number since these events are publicized more in the media than most other events. More people die of diabetes than terrorism, but we tend to believe terrorism is a bigger problem that diabetes. Maybe because it is gorier and more gruesome than a person dying lonely.

How does a person balance all this? A politician before an election can easily create an aura of positive happening to win the election.

Or let's say equipment in a manufacturing plant fails many times. Although it is just one equipment, its repeated failure can bring down people's estimates of the overall reliability of the plant.

Merely reminding people of their power increases their apparent trust in intuition. Recall how this works in corporate world. A powerless person might not be able to give opinion but a person, once aware of the power, will believe in his or her intuition, forgetting that merely by having power, and doesn’t make those intuitions likelier to succeed.

Since you can recall two plane crashes, you don't fly. But the risk hasn't changed at all.

Don’t assume pollution because of news. Look at the statistics.

After a disaster, insurance and prevention measures increase but over time they fade over. As a case of a disease claiming a life surfaces, availability heuristic increases the risk though it is the same.

The ease with which various ideas come into mind and our emotional reaction to these risks are inextricably linked.

Affect heuristic: Where people make judgements and decisions by consulting their emotions.

How do I feel about it rather than what do I think about it?

A healthy fear of consequences helps us to take better decisions.

Media coverage warps the rates of causes of accidents. Poignancy of such cases is deemed saleable and for viewer ratings media digs up accidents whereas most diseases kill many people than total number of accidents.

The emotional tail influences the rational dog.

Jonathan Haidt.

Perception of risk depends upon people and their opinions. If expert-judged risk doesn't seem agreeable to majority, what we should do? Now risk analysis done by governments shall be done by their appointed experts, who might choose a different measure, a measure largely unacceptable to people. 

Now why do media organisations highlight the worrying news? If they don't, people call it a heinous cover up. Recall how many on Twitter ask to cover events of communal riots in remote parts of India. To be fair to media, they do the digging up partly because of this, to not to let anyone raise shouts of cover up.

Dealing with small risks. Either we completely forget about them or we grossly overestimate these risks.

Small risks are painful and debilitating, yet they should not be overestimated, but should neither be ignored especially if they have caught the public attention.

Availability cascade A non-event that is inflated by media and the public until it fills the TV screens and public chit chats.

Representativeness: The lawn is trimmed, receptionist looks competitive, and the furniture is attractive, but it doesn't mean that it is a well-managed company. Do not let go by representativeness.

Representativeness often wins against logic. 

Conjunction fallacy: Where people judge a conjunction (combination or unification) of two events- bank teller and feminist bank teller to be more probable than one of the events in a direct comparison.

The shorter version of a problem doesn't allow us to use the system 2 and thus gets a quick answer out of system 1 which often can be illogical.

In the absence of competing intuition, logic prevails.

Look at these two statements:

Mark has hair

Mark has blond hair

Of course, 2nd statement isn't more plausible, more coherent or a better story.

Less is more.

	Set A: 40 pieces	Set B: 24 Pieces
dinner plates	8	8
Soup bowls	8	8
Dessert plates	8	8
Cups	8, 2 broken
Saucers	8, 7 broken
Joint evaluation price	$32	$30
Isolated Price	$23	$33

Set A and B are of same quality but set A has some extra saucers and cups and so in a way incomplete but still has more items more than set B. But when shown together for evaluation, A gets $32 to B's $30. When shown separately, A is $23 while B is $33

Clearly less becomes more. Perhaps no one wishes to pay for the broken items, even if you are getting more items. Removing 16 items (7 intact), price is increased.

Base rate.

Statistical base rates are facts about a population to which a case belongs, but they are not related for the individual case. 

Causal base rates are treated as information about the individual case and are easily combined with other case specific information.

Stereotyping is bad and there exists a strong social norm against it. If a group has an unfavourable statistic to it, it is unfair to judge individual who belongs to that group based on that information. So causal base rate must be rejected.

Regression to the mean: When a student performance deviates from the expected, we either praise or rebuke her. When she scores better next time, we believe the praise, or the reproach has worked but we tend to forget that she has simply regressed to the mean.

Criticism is no more effective than praise. It is simply regression to the mean.

The more luck is involved, the less there is to learn.

Hindsight bias is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others - physicians, politicians, advisers, coaches, CEOs, diplomats etc.

A successful move looks like a logical outcome while a decision that proved disastrous is deemed as a direct error by these people.

Therefore, hindsight bias and outcome bias are linked.

Because adherence to standard operating procedure is difficult to second guess, therefore experts and doctors order more tests and try conventional treatments even when they are not likely to help. No doctor would like to be in state where a patient has suffered, and he hasn’t done any tests. At least he’ll be able to say that he tried everything.

A successful company’s CEO is called flexible, methodical and decisive. One year later when company falls short of target, he is called rigid, confused and authoritarian.

Declaration of high confidence in prediction means that the individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily the story is true.

A random walk down wall street: Burton Malkiel

Men act more in the trading based upon their useless ideas than women, who achieve higher returns because of staying calm.

The illusion of skill is deeply ingrained in culture of industry. Why do people continue to live in the paradise of confidence that they are in control of markets, oil price and the instability and finally of the bottom line of the corporate? Why they hate to accept even a discussion on this?

The illusion is bolstered when you are in a company of similar minded individuals who think and behave in the same way all the time.

You naturally start believing that you can fight the odds and uncertainty.

Experts are inferior to algorithms. Why? Because experts try to think out of the box, try to be smart, and think too much of the complex formations before putting their recommendations.

When predictability is difficult, it is better to leave to the formulas.

The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making.

DrApgar rule: heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone and colour. Any new-born examined on these parameters after one minute are ranked 0, 1 or 2. Babies with a score over 8 are considered healthy while an infant with a score of 4 or less needs medical intervention. A simple algorithm which helps nurses decide the health of new-borns in hospitals.

Atul Gawande's "The Checklist Manifesto."

People don't like a job where they must be factual. Everyone wishes to input her own experience. I wish to put in mine a bit too much.

Disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits.

Sources of Power by Gary Klein

Intuition

The mystery of knowing without knowing is a human norm.

It is wrong to blame anyone for forecasting incorrectly in the complex world. However, it is wrong to believe forecasting can be done accurately every single time.

Intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.

Car on a curve vs. a ship at harbour. The ship pilot has a difficult task to acquire the skill because of long delay in action vs. outcome. Therefore, role of coaches is tough, an action today might show result months later or even a year later.

Therefore, to develop expertise, to see all is necessary. A psychotherapist listens to all responses of a patient but can't be sure whether cures suggested are effective or not since they have a long delay.

Anaesthesiologist has the best chance of learning intuitive skills since they see the effects of their action rather than a radiologist who can't be sure. So, it is prudent to listen to an anaesthesiologist when she says, "Something is wrong." 

She is very confident in her decision, but subjective confidence is a poor index of the accuracy of a judgement.

An expert must get feedback on his judgment to get an opportunity to learn.

Optimistic bias: Optimists live longer, stay cheerful and face consequences better than others. I have been an optimist too in a way that I do not take the outside view seriously. I do not really ask others how they fared into a situation or what decisions they took while in the same dilemma.

Optimists take better care of their health, are cheerful and happy and therefore popular. They are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders. Talented and lucky and luckier than they acknowledge.

60 pc of the new restaurants in US shut after 3 years. Will an optimist do research on such data? Unlikely. 

In a way optimist ignore a few possible ways of failing. They are persistent, but it can be costly to them. 

Financial benefits of self-employment are mediocre given the same qualifications; people achieve higher returns by selling them to employers than by setting out their own.

People tend to be overly optimistic about any activity in which they do moderately well.

Competition neglect is what optimistic entrepreneurs do. They are good for economy but risk their own futures while people who finish degrees and find jobs do good for themselves but are not too good for the economy.

Now experts can't show uncertainty in extreme circumstances otherwise matters would get worse, so leaders need a confident person even though he or she has no knowledge of future or possible modes of failures. Stakes are high, and leaders would not take uncertainty and wait-and-watch approach, so organisations plunge into decisions which prove fatal often.

Bold forecasts and timid decisions

Optimism is necessary as it keeps going the scientists, salespeople and entrepreneurs in the face of repeated instances of failures. Unless an entrepreneur can say the market is just coming up or a scientist can say that the conditions just went off at the final seconds of experiment or a salesperson watching a slammed door on the face that she (the customer) was in awful mood, no progress can be made by the society. We can laugh at these people and their statements, but this is the essence of a thriving life.

Pre-mortem is a technique where you plan everything and then imagine that one year has passed and the plan was a disaster. 

Underestimating the obstacles, competitor neglect 

Why people make risky choices?

Gambles represent the fact that consequences of choices are never certain.

People become risk takers when all options are bad.

Endowment effect. When you own something, you consider the pain of giving it up and the pain is more than the pleasure of acquiring it. Then why do the businessmen take so many risks which put them in a state where they might lose more than they acquire?

Endowment effect works when a person has held a commodity for a while. Perhaps a good business doesn’t hold the money for too long, just keep on investing.

The response to a loss is stronger than the gain.

Prospect theory. Reference points exist, and losses loom larger than corresponding gains. In a 50:50 coin toss game, losing $1000 dollars is more painful than getting $2000, so we do not bet, if asked to play a single time. If, however, the option is to play 10 times, grab it.

Poor people think like traders but are not indifferent to the difference in gaining and giving up. Their problem is all their choices are between losses.

Misers consider spending as a loss.

Bad events catch our attention more strongly than positive ones, a fact which explains the proliferation of murder, killed and death related words in headlines. Moreover, a model with eyes wide open will be likelier to warrant a second look than a simply smiling one.  Bad information is processed more thoroughly in our minds. In a way our minds pay too much attention to the bad or unpleasant thoughts than positive ones.

Friendship that takes years or build up can be wrecked in a single moment. More reason to avoid ugliness.

Loss aversion works like this. When I run to meet my target, I stop when I meet it despite having a lot of stamina on most days, forgetting that on a few days, I'll struggle. Why don’t I run longer when I have stamina left? Clearly, my priority is to avoid a loss (not completing the target) instead of overachieving. People work harder to avoid a loss or a bogey in Golf.  

The law will not pass if the people who stand to lose fight harder than those who stand to gain.

During negotiations, people concede what is less painful to them. 

Negotiations are easier if the pie is expanding.

Altruistic punishment is accompanied by increased activity in the pleasure centres of the brain which suggests that maintaining social order and the rules of fairness in this fashion is its own reward. That’s what motivates judges and police who not only get some money but also a lot of pleasure when they hand over justice to strangers.

Altruistic punishment is the glue that holds the society together. However, our brains are not designed to reward generosity as reliably as they punish meanness.

People who lose need more protection than those who could have gained.

Chances to win $1 million

From 0 to 5 pc

From 5 to 10 pc

From 60 to 65 pc

From 95 to 100 pc

Overweighting of small probabilities increase the attractiveness of both gambles and insurance policies. 5 pc risk to dear one causes us to pay high amount to eliminate the risk.

The four quadrants.

Rare events.

Avoiding buses when suicide bombers are in news and buying a lottery ticket. A relief from a fearful but less probable event's possibility to a pleasure obtained by owning a chance to win a near impossible yet probable lottery is similar.

Lottery tickets give the same pleasure as avoiding very low probability suspected terrorism areas.

People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events.

People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.

Rich and vivid representations of an outcome, whether emotional, reduce the role of probability in the evaluation of an uncertain prospect.

So, if you need to sell a project, sell it with colourful details to run imaginations of listeners wild and guide them into agreement.

Adding irrelevant but vivid details to a monetary outcome also disrupts calculation.

Denominator neglect

Urn A: 10 marbles one is red

Urn B: 100 marbles eight are red

30 to 40 pc people chose option B whereas clearly probability of getting a red marble out is higher in Urn A.

Reason is a single marble in an indistinct background of white marbles while urn B has eight winning red marbles in same indistinct vaguely defined background of white marbles which gives a more hopeful feeling.

0.01 pc accidents happen on this route means quite harmless but instead if you hear that one in 10000 cars will crash killing all passengers on this road, you will think twice before venturing on that road. This is how the presenting is done. The speaker chooses the style depending upon the situation.

An attorney who wishes to cast doubts over DNA test stats will not say the chance of false match is 0.1%. Instead, to paint the picture of his falsely accused unfortunate client, he will say one out of thousand false match occurs. Jury will see his client as the unfortunate man. The prosecutor, however, will continue to drill the numbers in jury's minds.

Salience is enhanced by mere mention of an event, by its vividness, and by the format in which the probability is described.

Tsunamis are rare in Japan, but the devastation caused by them makes the tourists cautious.

If you want people to be worried by risk, say that the disease kills one person in 10000

Decision 1

Choose between

A. Sure gain of $240

B. 25% chance to gain $1000 and 75pc chance to gain nothing.

Decision 2

C. Sure loss of $750

D. 75% chance to lose $1000 and 25pc chance to lose nothing.

73% pc people chose A and D while only 3 pc chose B and C

Surprisingly, this is how they look like:

AD 25% chance to win $240 and 75% chance to lose $760

BC 25% chance to win $250 and 75% chance to lose $750

Electrical conduction of the skin is used in lie detector machines.

Investments must be checked every quarter to avoid daily pain of losses. Remember pain outweighs the gain by a factor of more than 2 so doing this on daily basis can be emotionally taxing. Other factor is that analysing life daily will reveal losses which will lead to loss aversion, affecting decision making.

Aggregated feedback is what we should do.

A department manager has ten team leads reporting to him. If talked individually, they do not wish to take the decision which is akin to losing 100 and winning 200. Who would like to lose and have a bad name? But if all do take a risk, the whole department will end up gaining if success rate is more than 40%. How do we see this in the broader scenario?

The whole focus in life must be to improve skills, always. Chances will come and go, if the rate of success in an opportunity is more than 50 pc, you’ll end up winning.

Sunk cost fallacy

Regret is an emotion and is also a punishment we administer to ourselves.

Mr. Brown almost never picks up hitchhikers. Yesterday he picked up one and got robbed.

Mr. Smith frequently picks hitchhikers. Yesterday he gave ride to one and was robbed.

Now Mr. Brown will get public sympathy as being unlucky while Mr Smith will be criticized. 

Imagine a doctor who has a patient who is in critical condition. He has two choices – go for a normal medication, which is already proven to be having a low rate of success or to go with an unconventional treatment, which might improve a dying person but is unproven yet. Most doctors will choose the normal course of treatment in which they are saved even if the patient dies.

If I decide to send my daughter to a foreign school for her 11th and 12th grades, and she struggles with loneliness and fails to adapt, the blame will fall on me. However, if she experiences loneliness while attending university later on, the responsibility will lie with her. What should I opt for? A similar situation occurred with my older brother, leading to his unhappiness.

To avoid hindsight regret, be either very thorough or very casual about decisions having long term consequences.

We discover an excellent dish at the restaurant and never order anything else to avoid regret.

To sell an expensive item, the salesperson will say this is the safest. The customer will have to fight a safety trade-off taboo.

Absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not enough justification of taking risks. Several inventions like airplane, cars, anti-biotic, measles vaccine etc. would have never passed the precautionary tests.

In Europe, the precautionary principle, which prohibits any actions that might cause harm, is prevalent.

When we broaden the frame, we usually arrive at better decision. Does it mean that women do better by looking over a hundred dresses? 

When we evaluate single options, emotional reactions of system 1 are more likely to prevail while comparisons in joint evaluation involve more careful and effortful approach, usually done by system 2.

Framing

Consider the following statements

The one-month survival rate is 90pc

10 pc mortality in the first month

Even the physicians were susceptible to favouring the first statement where both are same. Medical training has no defence against the power of framing.

Book recommendation: Choice and consequence by Thomas Schelling

Framing Empty Intuitions

Outbreak of a new disease is expected to kill 600 people. Consider the consequences of the programs

Program A 200 people will be saved

Program B one third chance of saving 600 people and two thirds chance that no one shall be saved

Most people choose A certainty.

Now see the revised sentences

Program A: 400 people will die

Program B: one third chance that nobody will die and two thirds chance that 600 people will die.

In this selection, majority choose the gamble. 

A study in 2003 revealed that rate of organ donation was close to 100 pc in Austria but 12 pc in Germany, 86 pc in Sweden but only 4 pc in Denmark. Why?

Just an opt in or opt out form. In Austria, there is an opt out form to proclaim that you are not donating organs but in Germany, you must opt in. Both need forms to be filled, which people dislike.

Experiencing self and remembering self

A blissful performance for 40 min and a screeching sound at the end. The remembering self decides how to remember it overpowering the experiencing self, which might argue that the whole experience wasn't bad itself. 

Peak pain and duration of pain. Which one do you think prevails?

Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and memories can be wrong. 

An inconsistency is built in our minds. We have strong preference for pain and pleasure. We want pain to be short and pleasure to be longer. But out system 1 has evolved to represent or remember most intense pain or pleasure and the feelings when episode was at the end. 

The cold hand experience was like this: two episodes of hand dipping in cold water. One for 60 seconds and another for 90 seconds but in the 90 second dipping, during the last 30 seconds, temperature is raised by 1 deg. When given a choice to choose again, people chose second since it had better end, though the pain lasted for equal duration (60 seconds) in both. Another example would be about rides in a fun park. One ride, though fast and furious is not considered intimidating while another is mostly slow moving yet has a terrifying fall from a great height. System 1 will choose the first because just one moment of anxiety can turn otherwise calm ride dangerous.

Anything that ended badly need not be bad for its entire duration. Like a marriage ending in divorce. But usually for a marriage that ends in divorce after 20 years of happy coexistence, the story woven in hindsight by the onlooker is that the couple must have passed a lot of issues under the carpet or that they must have been be together for some attached benefits. A marriage must end well; this is how we are wired.

Even though good part lasted 10 times the bad part, we give good and the bad parts equal weight because of duration neglect.

Experiencing self is the one which lives our lives while we are remembering selves. We are strangers to experiencing self. 

If a movie has high points, exhilarating scenes, and moving drama, but kind of drags on, even if the audience enjoyed those moments, they'll remember it as a boring movie. The remembrance is important.

How happy you are with your life? 

How much happiness your car gives you? We can only know about this question when we think of the car...and when we think of it, we get biased and think about the virtues of the vehicle. Same happens when we think of a place say California or London. It may seem that living there is a dream but for a person who has lived there all the life, it is a stale thought. 

Old people who haven't saved enough in their youth get more sympathy than those who argue about a fat bill in a restaurant after a fat meal. Now here, clearly someone who hasn't done enough when he had to, is winning (in a way) while another who is just trying to economize his savings is looked in a poor frame.

Added during re-read in 2022

We can not only be blind to the obvious, but we are also blind to our blindness

He is so boring that I keep searching the expression where I lost the meaning

“Law of least effort" applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance

of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Let's say you are doing an operation like adding 3 to each digit of a number, say 4369, which becomes 7692 and then 0925 and so on. When we are doing this, a digit is in the process of transformation, one is transformed and need to be retained in the memory and two are waiting. 

People who do this well, do well on tests of general intelligence but they can be expected to be better air traffic controller or air force pilot but not engineers or businessmen or musicians.

Depletion of ego brings about intuitive errors. Glucose can supplement it. This is why tired players can make errors.

Tired and hungry mind falls back on a default decision.

Intelligence does not mean freedom from biases. It is the rationality which counts.

Priming effect: An image, a word or a visual can send ripples across the mind like waves in a pond. 

Looking at words associated with old age, words like wrinkle, slow, bald, weak eyesight can make you walks slowly. This influencing of action by an idea is called ideomotor effect. Works reverse as well!

Remain calm and kind regardless of your state and you will be rewarded.

Idea of money promotes individualism - a tendency to stay away from others, a reluctance to depend on others, and to accept demands from others.

Norms, surprises and causes

We have norms for vast number of categories and these norms provide background for immediate detection of anomalies like pregnant men or tattooed aristocrats.

Someone is late; someone is angry. We form immediate coherent stories

Bank may mean money related organization, but it can be riverbank if water was mentioned earlier. Context.

System 1 does not keep track of the alternatives it rejects; it doesn't have conscious doubt.

Understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it.

Author used to grade essays of his students one by one. All essays of the first student, grade and then move to the next one. If the first essay was good, he would tend to give benefit of doubt if any mistakes appeared in the subsequent essays.

All essays had equal weightage but obviously first one impacted the overall score.  His system 2 also accepted this uniformity in scores.

In the second method, he graded first essays of all students and then moved to second and so on. He realized that grade of second essay were now different.