Benoit Lelièvre's Reviews > Thinking, Fast and Slow

I bought the audiobook for this after a reviewer of Chuck Klosterman's latest book drew a parallel with THINKING, FAST AND SLOW and OF COURSE both books have nothing to do with one another. How do I keep getting suckered into reading these books about cognitive biases and heuristics, I do not know.

This one's pretty well made though and exposes a theory of two thought system: an intuitive one that takes instant decisions (like putting pants on in the morning) and hardwired to create coherence out of everything. It is this brain that scares people watching horror movies. There is also the second thought system that can very well override the first, which leads to conscious cognition. So that's cool and it's very enlightening to learn how to differentiate the two in your daily reactions.

The book can't transcend its nature though as it plays it safe with its own scientific angle and ends up being just a list of situations where heuristics are involved. There are a lot of books like this available on the market albeit it is quite well done. It can get mind-numbing after a while and especially if you read the audiobook version like I did. Wanted to throw myself off a cliff after 15 or so hours.