Daniel Kahneman
Dec 23, 2024 peoplepsychologycognitionrationality
Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) won the Nobel Prize in Economics for work on judgment under uncertainty. His popular book Thinking, Fast and Slow gave millions a vocabulary for predictable cognitive errors.
His signature move: make the reader experience the bias in fifteen seconds, then name what happened. You feel the anchoring effect before you learn the term. The concepts become tools because they’ve already caught you.
The writing is deceptively gentle — anecdotes and small experiments — but it’s doing something ambitious: making invisible mental machinery visible. Non-preachy authority. He shows you traps you’ll recognize in yourself.
Related: [[cognitive-handholds]], [[explanatory-writing]], [[chunking]], [[models]]