Thinking, Fast and Slow

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation ― each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives―and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.

• Part I: Two Systems
  
1. The Characters of the Story
2. Attention and Effort
3. The Lazy Controller
4. The Associative Machine
5. Cognitive Ease
6. Norms, Surprises, and Causes
7. A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions
8. How Judgements Happen
9. Answering an Easier Question
• Part II: Heuristics and Biases
10. The Law of Small Numbers
11. Anchors
12. The Science of Availability
13. Availability, Emotion, and Risk
14. Tom W's Speciality
15. Linda: Less Is More
16. Causes Trump Statistics
17. Regression To the Mean
18. Taming Intuitive Predictions
• Part III: Overconfidence
19. The Illusion of Understanding
20. The Illusion of Validity
21. Intuition vs. Formulas
22. Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?
23. The Outside View
24. The Engine of Capitalism
• Part IV: Choices
25. Bernoulli's Errors
26. Prospect Theory
27. The Endowment Effect
28. Bad Events
29. The Fourfold Pattern
30. Rare Events
31. Risk Policies
32. Keeping Score
33. Reversals
34. Frames and Reality
• Part V: Two Selves
35. Two Selves
36. Life As a Story
37. Experienced Well-Being
38. Thinking About Life

Well, if you want to be bored and get to no conclusion in reality, this is the book for you!

It tries to describe the fallacies of how we think/take decisions and challenges the common sense approach (which should make it an interesting read). Unfortunately, it has a lot of contrived and sometimes even cultural context-driven examples and some meaningless statistics thrown in.

Maybe the author has a lot of data not shown or have some great conclusions, but they are not present in this book. In fact, I would call the authors challenge to "common sense" a failure for the most part.

There may be some nuggets of wisdom in there, depending on your background, but it is very hard to find, and the extremely boring writing doesn't help.