Monday, July 29, 2013

I was wondering why I hadn't heard anything about the new book:  Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Apr 2, 2013) and then I checked the post to see if anyone had commented...

I hadn't posted it yet......  Well that is the new book and it is written by a Nobel Prize recipient in economics.  It is about how we think, the mistakes we make in thinking, and how we can identify them.

2 comments:

Natalie said...

I love this book. Such a great pick, Bill!

I didn't know how to put it into words or even if I should, but this book explains a lot of the reasons why I didn't care for The Hole in Our Gospel. Although I agreed with the thesis of the book (that we should care about the poor), I had a major problem with the statics, both in quantity and quality, in the book. As humans, we cannot think well in statistics without having educated and very hard working "System 2s". Which Thinking shows us that most of us (myself included) don't!

The example that stood out most to me was the 100 plane crashes a day. I thought it was a horrible example because there are 143 deaths by car crashes every single day. But that doesn't stand out much to us because it's something we register as being fairly common. The reason the 100 plane crashes stands out so much is not because of the number of people dying, but the number of PLANES crashing. A plane crash is such a rare event that this automatically triggers an alert response. Secondly, it affects anyone who flies or have loved ones who fly (which is quite a few of us). So it's also _personal_ to hear about these accidents because we wonder if our loved ones or ourselves might be next. So the analogy fails in its accuracy and, in my opinion, works more to manipulate emotions to the author's view. Although I agree with the author's general view on the poor, I don't think the ends justify the means. We shouldn't be playing with statistics to conjure up emotion. We should be praying for the Holy Spirit to change the hearts of His people, starting with us. There is so much truth in God's Word and in support of it that we don't need to be abusing the tricks that our System 1s play on us to get us to "do the right thing." Actually, I wonder if God is even really honored by that. I think it's when our hearts are changed (with both System 1 and 2 being active) where we truly honor Him. That's why I did love the personal testimony of the author as it is a great example of how God convicts and changes us. (Also showing it's not always a call to sell everything and move to Africa). I think it's good for us to love lavishly, but to still be as wise as serpents, realizing that not all giving is equal and without the wisdom and direction of God, we will have little idea about where our time and talents and money are best spent.

This was such a great pick, Bill! I think this should be required reading for every high schooler. Or even a class!

Thoughts of This Bill said...

I have liked the book as well. Studying Bayesian Probality was not the highlight thats for sure. I guess it reiterates your point about statistics though. Amen to the Holy Spirit needing to be the driver of action. Faith without Works is dead, but there are examples where Works without Faith is deadly. I have found some of the examples in Thinking to be disturbing related to how we naturally rule out facts in favor of the better or more coherent story, but it does explain much.