cdm reviewed Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a best-selling book published in 2011 by Nobel Memorial Prize …
Good insights
5 stars
- There is a fast thinking System 1 which is used most of the time and acts immediately and a slower working System 2 which does more analysing
- There is e.q. the need to always do pattern matching and find a reason behind something - like why a stock price changed
- The halo-effect is described. If a teacher reads two essays from the student and the first one is better, then the second one is getting a better grade even though it could be shit
- The law of small numbers is interesting. In smaller sample sizes, the outcomes are likely more extreme. E.g. smaller schools are more likely to be way worse or way better than bigger schools - not because the schools are actually better, but because there are too few people for a good statistic.
- The Anchor effect is also explained. When a question has an anchor like "is this house worth 100k?", then the people will start their estimate from the anchor (100k), so for a real estate agent a higher anchor is important
- Simple formulas are statistically better than complex ones or intuition
- As an entrepreneur or risk-taker in general, you have to be an optimist. Statistically you will most likely fail, that's why only optimists are founding companies - if they would be realists or pessimists, they wouldn't even start their endeavour.
- When a company gets acquired, the acquiring company normally trades lower on the stock markets. That's because usually the managers of the company which buys the other think they can manage the acquired company better than the previous management which is most of the time simply not true and the Wall Street knows this fact, that's why this discount happens.
- Management of a big company is normally overvalued. The CEO of a public traded company has most of the time a lesser impact on the company than other factors like competition and current market.