I'm Not Using My Brain Right Now So You Can Fool Me If You Want To

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is a slog. Not because it's dry or uninteresting but rather because you have to pay attention.

It's not that Thinking is hard to read, but you have to take some time out of your day to do it. It's not something you pick up while you're commuting to work or otherwise distracted because you'll have to read passages again and again. Which is kind of the point of the book.

Kahneman explains that our brains have two "systems," "System 1" and "System 2." To simplify, System 1 is intuitive and unconscious and System 2 applies the rest of your brain to what System 1 perceives. And most of the time, System 2 is a lazy piece of shit who goes back and screws up everything.

As an example, Kahneman opens with a simple question: If a ball and a bat cost $1.10 and the ball costs a dollar less than the bat, how much do each cost? You probably almost automatically answered $1 and 10 cents, which is wrong, because that would be 90 cents less. The correct answer is $1.05 and 5 cents. Most people get this question wrong, probably because they're busy or otherwise distracted and because unless we're really sharp and on it, our brains just suck, and no amount of 5-Hour Energy can ever fix that.

It's a slightly depressing prospect, or at least slightly humbling — if we can't really rely on our ability to rationally work through simple problems, then what of bigger, more important things? Don't answer that.

And to be fair, Kahneman doesn't attempt to do that, which is a little frustrating, but understandable — that's not what he's setting out to do. But if there's one thing Jonah Lehrer taught me, it's that we should demand more from popular scholarly writing, and less of ourselves; sometimes you want Kahneman to lob up some policy softballs for us to glom onto; tell us what to think, what we need to know, you know? Because as it stands now, sometimes Thinking comes off as a 400-some-odd-page parlor trick.

That's not to say that the book is not really fascinating and entertaining and that Kahneman is probably a hoot to talk with at a cocktail party, but in all seriousness, I was sometimes itching for more wisdom about how this insight can be applied to the world — more than just noting that most (90 percent!) of rail projects cost more than was projected and end up serving fewer passengers (the "planning fallacy").

The other thing I'm curious about (maybe Jonah Lehrer can elucidate this point) is why? Which is to say — and I don't think Kahneman explained this, or at least even mentioned it — what anthropological purpose does it serve for us to think so poorly? Maybe it doesn't have to serve a purpose, but it's such a feature of our brains that you start to wonder. And that's really dispiriting, when you think about it.

I remember some teacher at some point in either middle school or high school advising us on standardized test-taking strategies, saying that when a question seemed like a trick question, we shouldn't overthink our answer and instead go with our "gut." (And I'm lucky I never interviewed for a smart-person job, what with all those stupid questions they ask.) Like a lot of bad advice, I never forgot it. And that's part of why Thinking, Fast and Slow never stopped blowing me away.