A friend pointed out this article from Jonah Lehrer at The New Yorker about Daniel Kahneman’s new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (already pre-ordered for my Kindle!).
Some good lines from it:
Unlike homo economicus, that imaginary species featured in macroeconomics textbooks, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that real people don’t deal with uncertainty by carefully evaluating all of the relevant information. They stink at statistics and rarely maximize utility. Instead, their choices depend on a long list of mental short cuts and intemperate emotions, which often lead them to pick the wrong options.
And this:
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Kahneman and Tversky. Like Darwin, they helped to dismantle a longstanding myth of human exceptionalism. Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine.
And this:
As Kahneman and Tversky noted in the final sentence of their classic 1974 paper, “A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.” Unfortunately, such hopes appear to be unfounded. Self-knowledge isn’t a cure for irrationality; even when we know why we stumble, we still find a way to fall.
The article goes on to say that “self-knowledge is surprisingly useless.” An unfortunate discovery by Kahneman is that awareness of these problems does nothing to prevent them happening in an individual. Even Kahneman himself admits that he is just as succeptible as the rest:
“My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues.”
My only nitpick with the article is that to say self-knowledge is overrated may give the sense that it isn’t valuable. It is important to clarify that self-awareness may be overrated because it is not sufficient, but it is certainly still necessary. True, someone who sees it as the source of solving all one’s problems is in for an unpleasant surprise. But someone who disregards it because it alone doesn’t solve their problems is missing out on a big opportunity.
There is much to be done regarding using this knowledge to find ways to improve our lives and decision-making, of which I will be writing about more.
Thoughts? Is self-knowledge overrated?
Read the full New Yorker article here: Is Self-knowledge Overrated?
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