Thinking, Fast and Slow
vinhnx
17 points
4 comments
September 21, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (3 comments)
oceanplexian
Daniel Kahneman is a big EA (Effective Altruism) advocate, aka the cult that all the tech elites such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk are a part of. The book is selling you on a belief system (i.e. System1/System2). Then it uses some cherry picked data to set up a straw man to rationalize his idea of how the mind works. Death in a Shallow Pond is a good rebuttal to this even if it doesn't address the book directly.
makeitdouble
Discussions from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030791 Has anything came back to reestablish this book as worth the read ?
bko
My problem with this book is that it relies heavily on priming studies. The idea is that you "primed" them for some set of behaviors. Here's an example of a study that supposedly supports this. Participants held a pen in their mouth in one of two ways: - Between the teeth, without touching the lips. This activates some of the muscles used in smiling. - Between the lips, without using the teeth. This inhibits those smile-related muscles. If you think that's stupid and reading into this is foolish it's because it is. A lot of the arguments in this book are built in a delicate set of assumptions that are supported by equally ridiculous and contrived experiments, many of which cannot be reproduced.