Thinking, Fast and Slow quotes

“Kahneman opens by introducing the two protagonists of the entire book: System 1 and System 2, a metaphor for two modes of thinking.”

“The mechanism is that System 2 has a limited capacity, and tasks compete for it.”

“System 2 is in principle capable of monitoring and correcting System 1's intuitions, but doing so requires effort it would rather not spend.”

“The implication that unsettles many readers is the assault on the cherished sense of conscious agency.”

“Kahneman introduces 'cognitive ease,' the mind's continuous monitoring of how smoothly mental processing is going, on a spectrum from easy to strained.”

“What surprises us, and how quickly the surprising becomes unsurprising, reveals the silent norms System 1 is constantly consulting.”

“The same sequence of letters is read as a number in a numeric context and a letter in an alphabetic one, with no felt uncertainty.”

“Kahneman examines the machinery by which System 1 produces judgments, arguing that it is continuously and effortlessly computing a great deal more than we ever consciously request.”

“Kahneman introduces the single mechanism that explains a great deal of intuitive judgment: substitution.”

“Kahneman examines our flawed intuitions about statistics, beginning with a genuine mathematical fact: small samples produce extreme results far more often than large samples do.”

“Kahneman and Tversky's classic demonstration used a wheel of fortune secretly rigged to stop on either 10 or 65.”

“Kahneman defines the availability heuristic: we judge the frequency or probability of an event by the ease with which instances come to mind.”