Cognitive illusions !

Post date: Dec 31, 2012 4:39:22 PM

I started reading Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. In the very first chapter, he says at one point -

"We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." If you have lived this (I believe all of us have), then you know what exactly he is talking about!

A few paragraphs later, he says - "The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. ... biases can not always be avoided... As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning your own thinking would be impossibly tedious... The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own. ! "

Well.. this is something which we all know! I am going to love this book.. There is no doubt about it.