Roger's Re-think: Miscellaneous book highlights and essays

© Roger M Tagg 2012

Highlights of book: 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 2011, ISBN 978-0-374-27563-1

Introduction

Using a distinction between two supposed parts of the human mind - which were christened 'System 1' and 'System 2' by Stanovich and West - this book highlights the many biases we humans are subject to when we over-rely on our intuitive side, especially in the areas of judging, estimating and planning under uncertainty.

Kahneman is a joint Nobel Prize winner in Economics, which he claims to have never studied. This award was largely based on his (and Tversky's, who had previously deceased) proposal of 'Prospect Theory' (see later).

The book runs to over 400 pages, and contains 38 relatively short chapters, plus Introduction, Conclusion, reprints of 2 academic papers, notes and index. These may be available on the web, possibly via a university library or on payment. A set of slides covering chapters 35 to 39 is also available via a link in the main table on page 377.

The chapters are grouped into 5 'parts' as follows.

Chapter	Page	Highlight
Introduction	3	"Many of us spontaneously anticipate how friends and colleagues will evaluate our choices; the quality and content of these anticipated judgments therefore matters."
		"A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language." So, after each chapter, Kahneman (DK) gives a few examples of how the 'new' words he introduces might be used in practical everyday situations.
	4	"When the handsome and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, for example, you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments more favourably than he deserves."
		"Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition."
		"We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are."
	5	"People are not good intuitive statisticians."
	7-8	The availability heuristic = we are biased by the instances that come to our mind. Coverage by the media emphasizes this.
	12	DK gives the example of a chief investment officer who put tens of millions of dollars into Ford shares, on the 'gut feel' that he liked their cars; he didn't take any account of whether the shares were currently under or over priced.
Part I - Two systems	13	Intuition (approximating to our 'System 1') is the 'fast' of the book's title. If that fails us, we switch to a slower, more deliberate form of thinking - which is our 'System 2'. [RT: this sounds like saying that our minds have two active players - a 'Captain Kirk' and a 'Mr Spock'. So I have taken the liberty in these 'highlights' of sometimes substituting these names for Kahneman's 'System 1' and 'System 2'.]
	22	"The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common; they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away."
	24	"Captain Kirk continuously generates suggestions for Mr Spock; if endorsed by Mr Spock, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions."
		"When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 ..."
	25-6	There can be conflict between Kirk and Spock; "Spock is in charge of (our) self-control".
	27	A well known illusion is the so-called Müller-Lyer one; >< looks longer than <>.
	29	"The mind - especially System 1 - appears to have a special aptitude for the construction and interpretation of stories about active agents, who have personalities, habits and abilities." [RT: just like I have invoked Kirk and Spock. DK hopes that his use of Systems 1 and 2 will help people understand decision processes and judgment better. I hope that my Star Trek analogy will help readers with less of an academic background than myself, certainly than Kahneman.]
	34	"The life of System 2 is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint ... We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind."
	35	"A general 'law of least effort' applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion". Talent or acquired skill means we need to expend less effort on the same or equivalent task. "Laziness is built deep into our nature." This is DK's 'lazy controller' - we often don't get our System 2 up to speed (or consult Mr Spock), and hence fall back on System 1.
	40	"Accelerating beyond strolling speed ... brings about a sharp deterioration in my ability to think coherently."
		Csikszentmihalyi's 'flow' = "a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems". [RT: just like me when I was writing up these quotes and comments.]
	41	(Our) "System 1 has more influence on behaviour when (our) System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth" ... (and) "are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations". [RT: hopefully, Captain Kirk would be better than this!]
		"All variants of voluntary effort - cognitive, emotional or physical - draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy."
	41-2	Ego depletion = "An effort of will or self-control is tiring ... ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit."
	43	"The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose."
	44	A simple but common error: a bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? In experiments, the vast majority say 10c. Wrong - it should be 5c. Mr Spock failed to check Captain Kirk's answer in time.
	45	"Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions." This is a theme of the whole book.
		Another 'gotcha': "All roses are flowers; some flowers fade quickly, therefore some roses fade quickly." Logical? No, none of the quick faders might be roses.
	48	"Individuals who uncritically follow their intuitions about puzzles are also prone to accept other suggestions from (their) System 1. In particular, they are impulsive, impatient and keen to receive immediate gratification."
	49	"According to Stanovich, 'rationality' should be distinguished from 'intelligence'.
	51	DK describes our brain as an 'associative machine'. Associative activation = "ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain."
	52	Hume's 3 principles of association were: "resemblance, contiguity in time, and causality". [RT: Hume was sceptical about 'cause'; see also Michotte on page 76.]
	52-3	Priming = affecting people's judgment by presenting an initial 'trigger', e.g. speaking or displaying a word, or highlighting an event or experience. An example is the Florida effect - people unconsciously walking more slowly after exposure to words associated with old age.
	55-6	In experiments, "the idea of money primes individualism".
	56	Verbal reminders of respect, God or the 'Dear Leader' prime obedience ... and "also lead to an actual reduction in spontaneous thought and independent action". [RT: like "man proposes, God disposes"?]
		"Reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas." [RT: does that include Anzac Day ceremonies?]
		The Lady Macbeth effect = "Merely thinking about stabbing a co-worker in the back leaves people more inclined to buy soap, disinfectant or detergent - than batteries, juice or candy bars".
	57	"A few percent" (of people being deliberately primed) "could tip an election".
	58	"The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works."
		A reference: Timothy Wilson, 'Strangers to Ourselves'.
	59	Our human life can be seen as containing an aircraft's (or the starship Enterprise's) "cockpit, with a set of dials that show the current values of ... 'Is anything new going on?', 'Is there a threat?', 'Are things going well?', Should my attention be diverted?', 'Is more effort needed for this task?' ". "One of the dials measures 'cognitive ease', and its range is between 'Easy' and 'Strained'."
	60	If inputs to this 'ease' dial are 'relaxed experience', 'clear display', 'primed idea' or 'good word', then our task feels familiar, true, good or effortless. If the dial shows 'strained', we may be more vigilant and suspicious, may pay more attention, but may be less intuitive and creative.
	62	"Predictable illusions inevitably occur if a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive ease or strain. Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs."
		"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition." [RT: many of us apply this maxim to TV adverts.]
	63	Bold typeface, rhymes and easily pronounced names [RT: and acronyms?] all affect our System 1's liability to be influenced. [RT: no hope for Csikszentmihalyi, then. Actually, when authoring academic papers, I think a peculiar name helps!]
	65	In an experiment with Princeton students, cognitive strain (in the form of washed-out grey print) actually mobilized the subjects' System 2, and they made fewer errors when answering 'gotcha' type questions.
	67	"The effect of repetition on 'liking' is an important biological fact ... survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty."
	69	"Good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility and increased reliance on System 1 form a 'cluster'. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach and increased effort also go together."
	71	"The main function of (your) System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is 'normal' in it."
	73	Another 'gotcha' - "How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?" Many people said 2! But wasn't it Noah?
	75	"Fred's parents arrived late. The caterers were expected soon. Fred was angry". We probably infer that this wasn't because of the caterers. "Finding such causal connections is part of understanding a story, and is an automatic operation of System 1. Mr Spock (System 2, your conscious self) was offered the causal interpretation and accepted it."
		Another reference: Nassim Taleb, 'The Black Swan'; this addreses the "automatic search for causality".
	76	Albert Michotte also studied this issue (try the experiment on his Wikipedia page). "The commonly accepted wisdom was that we infer physical causality from repeated observations of correlations among events." "Michotte ... argued that we 'see' causality, just as directly as we see colour."
		"We are evidently ready from birth to have 'impressions' of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of (our) System 1."
		"Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personailty traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities."
	77	We humans have invented the word 'soul' to explain a lot of things.
		Paul Bloom (2005): "We perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls." This, DK suggests, is because of our readiness to separate physical causality and intentional causality.
		This makes "it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions, (that #1) an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and (that #2) immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die".
		"People are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately." [RT: I think that's an understatement!]
		"Unfortunately, Captain Kirk (our System 1) does not have the capability for this (i.e. statistical thinking) mode of reasoning. Our System 2 can learn to think statistically (as Mr Spock did), but few people receive the necessary training."
	78	An example of DK's expanded vocabulary: "She can't accept that she was just unlucky; she needs a causal story. She will end up thinking that someone intentionally sabotaged her work." [RT: I personally know an actual case of this.]
	79	" 'Jumping to conclusions' ... (is) ... an apt description of how (our) System 1 works."
	81	"Kirk is gullible and biased to believe, Spock is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but Spock is sometimes busy and often lazy."
		"The operations of associative memory contribute to a general confirmatory bias.
		A 'positive test strategy' = a "deliberate search for confirming evidence". This is "contrary to the rules of philosophers of science [RT: like Popper], who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them".
	82	The halo effect = "exaggerated emotional coherence", i.e. because we like it emotionally, it must be correct.
	82-3	Between Alan, "intelligent - industrious - impulsive - critical - stubborn - envious" and Ben "envious - stubborn - critical - impulsive - industrious - intelligent", most experiment subjects preferred Alan. "The halo effect increases the weight of first impressions" - but which trait is presented first is often a matter of chance.
	84	"To tame the halo effect, ... de-correlate error" - which effectively means getting multiple truly independent judgments.
	85	"The measure of success for (our) System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create." [RT: so, not whether it is accurate, pragmatic, or likely to help make good decisions.]
	86	We tend not to start our judgments "by asking 'What do I need to know before I formed an opinion?' ...".
	86-7	One illusion is WYSIATI = "What You See Is All There Is" [RT: i.e. anything you don't know about can't possibly be relevant.]. WYSIATI pushes us to jump to conclusions, and "facilitates the achievement of coherence".
	87	In experiments, "participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments than those who saw both sides".
		"The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little."
		"We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing."
	88	Framing effects = dependency on how a question or statement is framed, as different framings can evoke very different emotions.
		Base rate neglect = a statistical error of not taking into account how large the populations of different sets of things are.
		Another vocabulary example: "They didn't want more information that would spoil their story.
	90	People often judge a candidate for leadership on their first look of his face - "Does he look competent?" Todorov divided this into 'strength' and 'trustworthiness'. These are examples of what DK calls judgment heuristics.
	93	Our System 1 "deals well with averages but poorly with sums" - one reason that the numbers of instances in categories can get ignored.
		In an experiment about donating to protection of endangered birds, subjects offered much the same in $$ for saving 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 birds; they only reacted to the 'prototype', i.e. a single unhappy oil-covered bird.
	94	We often judge on simple intensity scales - i.e. 'more', 'less' or 'similar to'.
	95	Mental shotgun = firing too many redundant 'pellets' of information or triggering stimuli. We may see information we don't need, or that slows us down. DK's example is the 'vote-goat' rhyme; no delay if the words are spoken, but if written we have to overcome the spelling difference.
	98	"The heuristics that I discuss in this chapter are not chosen; they are a consequence of the mental shotgun."
	100	The 3-D illusion: a perspective picture of 3 men on an escalator moving into the distance. If two men are of the same size in 2 dimensions, the one 'further away' in 3-D looks bigger. [RT: I think the phrase is 'trompe l'oeil'.]
	102	Before asking students in an experiment 'How happy are you?', if they were first asked 'How many dates have you had in the last month?' many substituted that question for the next one.
	103	"In the context of attitudes, however, Mr Spock is more of an apologist for the emotions of Captain Kirk than a critic ...".
	105	The following table summarizes the characteristics of System 1 (features marked with a * are introduced in detail in part  IV).
		• generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions • operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control • can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search) • executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training • creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory • links a sense of cognitive case to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance • distinguishes the surprising from the normal • infers and invents causes and intentions • neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt • is biased to believe and confirm • exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect) • focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI) • generates a limited set of basic assessments • represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate • matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness) • computes more than intended (mental shotgun) • sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics) • is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)* • over-weights low probabilities* • shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)* • responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)* • frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*
Part II -	111	Smaller samples (of anything) always tend to give more extreme results; in larger samples things tend to average out.
Heuristics	112	"Psychologists commonly choose samples so small that they exposed themselves to a 50% risk of failing to confirm their hypotheses."
and Biases	114	"You (i.e. we, the intuitive statisticians!) may not react very differently to a sample of 150 and to a sample of 3,000.
	115	"We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls [as successive births in a hospital]) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or someone's intention."
	116	"Analysis of thousands of sequences of (basketball) shots lead to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a 'hot hand' in professional basketball". It is "entirely in the eye of the believers". At least one coach didn't want to hear this.
	118	"We pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability."
	119	Anchoring effect = any number that gets mentioned as a starting point (e.g. in estimation or bargaining) makes a difference to people's subsequent offers or revised estimates.
	121	Adjustment from an anchor usually stops too soon when people run into uncertainty - and it's effortful; "tired people adjust less".
	122	Anchoring can be a form of 'priming' (p52), i.e. a 'suggestion'.
	124	Anchoring index = 100% if people all accept the anchor; 0% if they totally ignore it. The value in most situations is somewhere in between.
	126	When haggling, we shouldn't try countering an opponent's first offer with another extreme. We should refuse to accept their offer as a basis for negotiation (i.e. as an anchor) and walk out.
	127	Capping lawsuit awards "would eliminate all larger awards, but as an anchor would also pull up the size of many awards that would otherwise be much smaller".
	128	"Whether the story is true or believable matters little, if at all."
		"Many people find the priming results unbelievable ... because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy." Same with anchoring.
	129	The availability heuristic = "the process of judging frequency by 'the ease with which instances come to mind' ".
	130	Salient events over-influence our estimates of the frequency of, e.g., Hollywood divorce rates, political sex scandals, dramatic accidents, personal experiences.
	131	Availability bias = going on what you remember or what comes to mind. In a survey of couples, both partners estimated the % of each household chore they did, and these usually added up to more than 100%. So we should joke "there is usually more than 100% credit to go around".
	132	"People who had just listed 12 instances (where they had been assertive) rated themselves as less assertive than people who had only listed 6." (The effort in thinking of enough had an effect.) It was the opposite with meek behaviour. This has been described as a fluency effect.
	135	"The ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged."
		George W Bush (Nov 2002): "I don't spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act. I've just got to know how I feel."
	138	Estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage, as in this table.
		Actual ratio What experiment subjects thought Strokes v all accidents 2:1 Accidents are more Tornadoes v Asthma 1:20 Tornadoes are more Lightning v Botulism 52:1 Botulism is more All diseases v all accidents 18:1 About the same All accidents v Diabetes 1:4 Accidents by 300:1
	139	Affect heuristic = the process of judging on the basis of questions like 'Do I like it?' 'Do I hate it?' How strongly do I feel about it?' - as a substitute for some harder question. It shows up very often in questions about technologies with benefits and risks. Depending on sentiment, many people consider either 'all benefits' or 'all risks'.
	140	Paul Slovic's picture of Mr and Ms Citizen "is far from flattering: guided by emotion rather than by reason, easily swayed by trivial details, and inadequately sensitive to differences between low and negligibly low probabilities. However even experts show some of the same biases, although maybe to a lesser extent.
	141	Slovic: "Human beings have invented the concept of 'risk' to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life ... there is no such thing as 'objective risk'. [RT: but maybe there are probabilities, even if these may be to some extent subjective.]
	143	With small risks, "we either ignore them altogether, or give them far too much weight - nothing in between".
	144	"Terrorism speaks directly to System 1."
		Availability cascade = media feeding frenzy on certain events.
	146-7	The 'Tom W' example: when experiment subjects didn't have a character resume on him, they took account of the enrolment numbers of each specialty he might enroll in when predicting the probabilities of him entering each (the base rates). But when they had a report from psychological tests, they forgot those base rates, and relied more on their stereotypes of students taking each specialty, and judging if Tom W fitted them.
	151	We fall for "sins of representation". One of these is "an excessive willingness to predict the occurrence of unlikely (low base rate) events".
	152	"Instructing experiment subjects to 'think like a statistician' enhanced the use of base rate information, while the instruction to 'think like a clinician' had the opposite effect."
	153	Added to all this, the statement of the question in the experiment did explicitly mention the "uncertain validity" of the psychological tests.
	154	"Bayes's rule specifies how prior beliefs (e.g. base rates) should be combined with the ... degree to which the evidence favours the hypothesis over the alternative."
	157	The 'Linda' example: the probability that she is a feminist bank teller must be less than the probability that she is just a bank teller (feminist tellers are a subset of all bank tellers). Yet experiment subjects widely rated the first option as more probable, presumably because it fits the stereotype better. This is known as the conjunction fallacy, and is a failure of System 2. [RT: Mr Spock wouldn't fall for it, I think.]
	159	Part of the problem is that "the notions of coherence, plausibility and probability are easily confused by the unwary".
	160	"A trap for forecasters and their clients; adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true."
	161	Other experiments are described that show similar "less is more" results. These concern sets of dinner plates, baseball cards, and Borg winning a match after losing the first set. Some broken plates (or less valuable cards) were added to the larger sets. When subjects saw both options together, their System 2 could make the correct choice, but taken one at a time they got the choice wrong.
	163	In a similar question about men over 55 and heart attacks, 65% got it wrong if the question was framed with percentages, but only 25% were wrong if it was framed with numbers of individuals.
	164	"Intuition governs judgments in the 'between subjects' condition; logic rules in joint evaluation.
	168	" 'Statistical base rates' are facts about a population to which a case belongs ... 'Causal base rates' are treated as information about the individual case." For more see this web address.
		"System 1 ... represents categories as norms and prototypical exemplars ... stereotypes.
	168-9	"Some stereotypes are perniciously wrong, and hostile stereotyping can have dreadful consequences, but the psychological facts cannot be avoided. Stereotypes, both correct and false, are how we think of categories."
	169	"Neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong."
	173	"Students quickly exempt themselves (and their friends and acquaintances) from the conclusions of experiments that surprise them" (as in the example of nice people not helping a colleague with a sudden illness because there were lots of other people around).
	174	"Students' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular."
		"There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases."
		"Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience."
		"On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact ... You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behaviour than by hearing surprising facts about people in general."
	177-8	Regression to the mean =  averaging out over time. It's a bit like having larger samples after small ones. A good example is first day scores in a 4-day golf tournament. How do we estimate the golfers' scores on day 2? Was the first day due to talent or luck? As days pass, the variation gets less. In fact if one took day 2 first and then tried to estimate the day 1 score from this the same effects would apply.
	178	So regression does NOT have a causal explanation, such as the 'Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx'. Maybe the cursed sportsman was on the cover because he or she had had a run of good luck.
	182	"Why is it (i.e. to explain regression) so hard? ... Our mind is strongly biased towards causal explanations."
	183	Many researchers have incorrectly deduced cause from correlation.
	189	When predicting based on some correlated measurements, one should always consider both the shared factors and the factors specific to each of the related measurements and what you are trying to estimate.
	190	One should use the correlation coefficient to reduce the distance one moves from the default base-rate estimate towards one based on the related measurements.
	192	"Correcting your intuitions may complicate your life. ... Absence of bias is not always what matters most. ... There are situations in which one type of error is much worse than another."
	193	We are not all rational, and some of us may need the security of distorted estimates to avoid paralysis." [RT: this is my experience too. On one job, when we were getting inaccuracy in estimates from managers, we asked one manager why he thought estimates were so optimistic. He replied "If we really thought the realistic estimate was all we could hope for, we'd lose heart and give up."]
Part III - Overcon -fidence	199	Narrative fallacies = "The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen."
		"We humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true."
		"You [RT: I'd say 'we'] are always ready to interpret behaviour as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits - causes that you [we] can readily match to effects."
	200	"The human mind does not deal well with non-events."
	201	"Our confronting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."
	202	"The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ." [RT: I would call it a 'meaning-making' organ.]
		"A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed." [RT: i.e., we're not good at looking back to an earlier point in time and remembering what we thought, or knew, at that time.]
		We say "I knew it all along" more often than "I was surprised".
	204	"The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias."
		"Decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions - and to an extreme reluctance to take risks." [RT: This seems to be the norm nowadays for most decision makers.] An example is medical malpractice litigation.
		"Increased accountability is a mixed blessing."
		"The sense-making machinery of (our) System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable and coherent than it really is." [RT: and I'm not sure that System 2 is much better.]
	206	"The demand for illusory certainty is met in two popular genres of business writing: (1) histories of the rise (usually) and fall (occasionally) of particular individuals and companies; and (2) analyses of differences between successful and less successful firms." [RT: this doesn't apply just to firms.] They all exaggerate the impact of leadership style and management practices.
	207	"A study of Fortune's 'Most Admired Companies' finds that over a 20-year period, the firms with the worst ratings went on to earn much higher stock returns than the most admired firms." The average gap will decrease anyhow due to 'Regression to the Mean', as with the good day 1 golfers.
	209	"Poor evidence can make a very good story."
	212-3	With stock markets, "a major industry appears to be built largely on an illusion of skill ... The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think the current price (of any given stock) is wrong."
	213	Terrance Odean took a year's data and found that, on average, people made a loss of 3.2%, not including the cost of doing the trades themselves.
	214	The least active traders did best, and women did better than men.
	216	"Facts that challenge such basic assumptions (e.g. that stock picking over the long term is a skill), and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem, are simply not absorbed; the mind does not digest them."
	217	"People can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers." [RT: this probably applies to religious sects, academic specialties, political parties and many others.]
	218	"The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained."
		"The often-used image of the 'march of history' implies order and direction."
	218-9	In Tetlock's study, 284 'experts' in forecasting future conditions "performed worse (on average) than they would have if they had assigned equal probabilities to each of the 3 potential outcomes." [RT: on Tetlock's Wikipedia page; they made 28,000 predictions and were slightly better than chance, but worse than a simple computer prediction.]
	219	"The more famous the forecaster, the more flamboyant the forecasts."
	219-20	"Experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong. They gave excuses like the hedgehogs (see below).
	220	In Isaiah Berlin's 'Hedgehogs and Foxes' parable (based the theory of history in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'), for hedgehogs (who have one big idea) "a failed prediction is almost always 'off only on timing', 'very nearly right' or 'wrong for the right reason' " - unlike the foxes, "who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea" (see the Wikipedia page). But foxes would not get invited to be in a TV debate.
	222-3	Over a large number of comparisons of 'clinical' and 'statistical' predictions, statistics do better in 60% of cases
	224	Ashenfelter's statistical formula for predicting the prices of vintage wines shows a .90 correlation with actual process.
	226	Multiple regression for deciding weights of individual predictive factors doesn't do much better than taking the weights as 'all equal'.
	227	Virginia Apgar introduced a simple formula for deciding whether to intervene with newborn babies - still used today.
	228	Many people have an anti-anything-artificial or anti-anything-technical bias.
	229	"The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a result of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is readily translated into a moral preference."
	247	DK learnt some lessons from the fact that an earlier book took 8 years to get published when the project team had agreed that it would take 2 years. They had ignored comparisons with similar projects that took 7-10 years, with a 10% chance of total failure as well. See below:
		1) There's the inside view (what we as a team think) and the outside view (what knowledgeable people who are not personally involved think). 2) The team was really estimating on a 'best case' scenario. 3) we irrationally tend to persevere for too long [RT: presumably to keep our current jobs going.]
	248	Donald Rumsfeld [RT: I never thought I would be quoting him on my website!] talked about the 'unknown unknowns'. Examples DK gives are "the divorces, the illnesses, the crises of coordination with bureaucracies". [RT: I rather like Slavoj Žižek 's  unknown knowns, the ones we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know.]
		"The outside view will give an indication of where the ballpark is, and it may suggest ... that the inside view forecasts are not even close to it."
	249	" 'Pallid' statistical information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with our personal impressions of a case." The standard excuse for this is "Every case is unique".
	250	Planning optimism is very widespread, presumably because we want to do the project, but for other reasons than the explicit ones.
	251-2	An antidote to the above proposed by DK and Tversky, but developed for practical use by Flyvbjerg is reference class forecasting = adjusting a baseline based on similar projects elsewhere.
	253-4	The sunk cost fallacy = throwing good money after bad "because we've invested all this money and don't want to be seen as foolish".
	256	"When action is needed, optimism, even of the wildly delusional variety, may be a good thing."
	258	"Psychologists have confirmed that most people genuinely believe that they are superior to most others on most desirable traits" - and they are prepared to bet on it.
		"Firms with award-winning CEOs subsequently under-perform."
	259	"Optimistic risk taking of entrepreneurs surely contributes to the economic dynamism of a capitalistic society."
	260	Founders and participants of start-ups think that success is 80% dependent on what they do. This is partly due to WYSIATI - they can't do much about what they don't know, but maybe they should find out more before they start. What about competitors, for example?
	262	"When we estimate a quantity we rely on information that comes to mind, and construct a coherent story in which the estimate makes sense. Allowing for the information that does not come to mind - perhaps because one never knew it - is impossible." [RT: sounds to me like most 'business plans'.]
		"The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable." And this someone "won't get invited to strut their stuff on (TV etc) news shows." [RT: Australian weather forecasts seem to follow this dictum - and so risk losing credibility when they don't get it right. Residents of southern England might remember the great storm of 1987.]
	264	"Subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it."
	264-5	A pre-mortem = a process in which each member of a team has to imagine a situation, one year in the future, in which the outcome of the plan was a disaster; each person is given 5-10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster. This legitimizes the expression of doubts, otherwise "the suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice".
Part IV - Choices	271-2	Prospect Theory (i.e. of choice under uncertainty) is what DK and Tversky proposed as better than the existing and widely-used standard measure of Expected Utility.
	272	Fechner's law states that subjective quantity in a person's mind is proportional to the logarithm of the physical quantity. [RT: a bit like decibels?]
	273	Also, we prefer $80 for sure to an 80% chance of $100 (which means a 20% chance of nothing).
		The idea of 'expected utility' attempts to take these considerations into account.
	274	However, Bernoulli's utility function ignores the psychological effect of change; the utility we attach to some quantity (e.g. income, profit) is not independent of what we had before - we don't, for example, like to take a drop in salary.
		DK's parable is: "You need to know about the background before you predict whether a grey patch on a page will appear dark or light."
	277	Theory-induced blindness = "Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come across an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing". "Disbelieving is hard work, and System 2 is easily tired."
	279	"The disutility of losing $50 could be greater than the utility of winning the same amount."
	281	We just psychologically like winning and hate losing.
		"Bernoulli's missing variable is the reference point." [RT: as with advertiser's discounts - 30% off what?]
	282	DK describes the '3 bowls of water' trick - one hot, one ice cold, one at room temperature. Experiment subjects have to put their hands in an extreme bowl first, then in the middle. The circumstances in the bowl entered second are the same whether the subject starts in the hot or the cold, but the experience is different.
		Three factors in Prospect Theory are 1) the feeling about change; 2) diminishing sensitivity; 3) loss aversion.
	283	DK and Tversky proposed an asymmetric S-curve about the reference point. Value is expressed as subjective utility. Gains or losses are measured relative to this reference point. The curve drops more steeply for losses, representing loss aversion. The gradients on both the gains and losses sides drop off due to diminishing sensitivity. NB - there's a better graph than this on the Prospect Theory Wikipedia page.
	284	Typical loss aversion ratios are between 1.5 and 2.5.
	287	But even Prospect Theory fails to allow for regret - i.e. the psychological feeling about "what might have been". The reference point in this has effectively switched from "where we are now" "to where we might have been".
	288	As an example, a choice between 90% chance of receiving $1 million or $50 with certainty gives more regret if you don't take the gamble, than if the choice was 90% chance of receiving $1 million or $150,000 with certainty.
	292	Prospect Theory relates to economists' Indifference Curves - the reference point becomes critical.
	293	The Endowment Effect = a gap between maximum buying price and minimum selling price because someone attaches value to 'having' whatever the thing being traded is. Prospect Theory sees these different figures as the pleasure of getting the thing versus the pain of giving it up. The reference point is different before and after we 'have' it. The pain of giving it up something nice may be greater than the pleasure of getting it, as was the case with the professor's fine wine collection.
	294	The endowment effect only applies to some things - not to, for example, $5 notes, which are 'held for exchange' rather than 'held for use'.
		Another example of such a 'nice thing' might be leisure time, possibly trade-able against salary.
	298	Things are different if trading is the norm, i.e. if we are thinking as traders. [RT: like collecting stamps for profit rather than for the pleasure of being able to look at the collection.
		'Decision making under poverty' may also have different rules.
	299	Compared with US students, UK students showed less endowment effect.
	301	"The brain responds quickly to purely symbolic threats." The 'Amygdala' acts as the 'threat centre'.
	302	"The negative trumps the positive in many ways."
		For long-term success of a relationship, good interactions need to "outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1".
	302-3	"A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future; not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding a goal is a gain."
	303	'Par' in golf is a perfect example of a reference point.
	304	Statistically, golfers putting for par do better than when putting for a birdie.
	306-7	Economic 'fairness' in business: where should the line be drawn? Reference points of the status quo have an influence (e.g. union negotiations).
	311	How "good is the news" of each of the following 5% increases in the chances of receiving $1 million? It certainly isn't linear.
		From 0% to 5% The possibility effect comes into play From 5% to 10% Not so much difference From 60% to 65% Not so much difference From 95% to 100% The certainty effect comes into play
	315	Allais's experiment showed the following cumulative figures of utility/'good news' in this situation:
		0% 1% 2% 5% 10% 20% 50% 80% 90% 95% 98% 99% 100% 0 5.5 8.1 13.2 18.6 26.1 42.1 60.1 71.2 79.3 87.1 91.2 100
	316	There is a whole psychology of worry about very small risks.
	317	The 'Fourfold Pattern'   GAINS LOSSES HIGH The gamble is ... 95% chance to win $10,000 95% chance to lose $10,000 PROBABILITY Prevailing emotion Fear of disappointment Hope to avoid large loss 'Certainty effect' Most people are ... RISK AVERSE RISK SEEKING   Most people ... Accept unfavourable settlement Reject favourable settlement         LOW The gamble is ... 5% chance to win $10,000 5% chance to lose $10,000 PROBABILITY Prevailing emotion Hope of large gain Fear of large loss 'Possibility effect' Most people are ... RISK SEEKING RISK AVERSE   Most people ... Reject favourable settlement Accept unfavourable settlement
	318-9	The top right quarter is where most disasters happen - people gamble in the hope of avoiding the loss.
	319	"Because defeat is so difficult to accept, the losing side in wars [RT: and in many other conflicts] often fights long past the point at which the victory of the other side is certain, and only a matter of time." And the same happens in some lawsuits.
	320-1	If New York faces 200 frivolous lawsuits a year, each with a 5% chance of succeeding, it might be tempted to settle each for $100,000. But this would be worse than an 'always fight it' policy ($20 million versus $10 million).
	321	"Consistent over-weighting of improbable outcomes - a feature of intuitive decision making - eventually leads to inferior outcomes.
	322	Terrorism is effective because "it leads to an 'availability cascade'.
	323	"System 1 cannot be turned off."
	324	Simplistically, "people overestimate probabilities of unlikely events, and over-weight unlikely events in decisions".
		"Our mind has a useful capability to focus spontaneously on whatever is odd, different or unusual."
	326-7	"The successful execution of a plan is easy to imagine when one tries to forecast the outcome of a project. In contrast, the alternative of failure is diffuse, because there are innumerable ways for things to go wrong." [RT: so, we should use pre-mortems!]
	326	In an experiment at the Uni of Chicago offering money, kisses and electric shocks, "affect-laden imagery overwhelmed the response to probability"
	328	"A rich and vivid representation of the outcome, whether or not it is emotional, reduces the role of probability in the evaluation of an uncertain project."
	329	Denominator neglect - is e.g. when many people choose to draw from urn B containing 8 red (valuable) out of 100 marbles, when urn A has 1 red out of 10 marbles.
		"System 1 is much better at dealing with individuals than categories."
		In an experiment, people thought that "a disease that kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000" was more dangerous than one that "kills 24.14% of the population"; and even one that kills "24.14% of 100".
	330	Activists for certain causes often use this sort of framing "to frighten the general public" as part of their campaigns.
	331	"Decimal points clog the mind, compared with a (simple) 'number of individuals'."
		The art in all this is to increase (or decrease) the 'salience' of possible events.
	331-2	A decision based on experience only isn't necessarily the same as if the probability is described.
	332	Obviously under-weighting is common among people who never experienced the rare event (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, bubble-bursts in house prices). It's much the same with global environmental threats.
	333	"Obsessive concern (e.g. DK driving well clear of a bus in Jerusalem), concrete representations (e.g. '1 person out of 100) and explicit reminders (as in choice based on a description) all contribute to over-weighting."
		A vocabulary example: "It's the familiar disaster cycle. Begin by exaggeration and over-weighting, then neglect sets in."
		Another vocabulary example: "We shouldn't focus on a single scenario, or we will overestimate its probability. Let's set up specific alternatives and make the probabilities add up to 100%."
	334-6	'System 1' choices in a 2-(separate) stage decision can lead to (inconsistently) unequivocally worse outcomes in the combined decision.
	336	If the choice is between narrow framing and broad framing, the latter is usually best.
	338	If we are making decisions as a job, we need to 'broad frame' - i.e. win some, lose some - but we need to control our emotional response when we do lose.
	339	"The combination of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse."
		"Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition."
	340	We need to have broad-frame risk policies - analogous to and 'outside view'.
	341	People investing seriously (e.g. as a job) need to "think like a trader".
		"If each of our executives is loss averse in his or her own domain" then the organization as a whole is probably "not taking enough risk". [RT: one might have to be careful applying this in a bad bear market.]
	343	We all do mental accounting - usually with narrow-frame headings.
	344	When investors need cash, there is "a massive preference for selling winners rather than losers - a bias that has been given an opaque label: the disposition effect" (which is equivalent to narrow framing).
		The price one bought the stocks at shouldn't be a consideration, only what they are likely to do in the future.
	345	It's better to sell the loser - one can put it against gains to reduce tax.
		It's the 'sunk-cost fallacy' to invest additional resources into a losing account. A non-investment example is driving into a blizzard because one has paid for the tickets to an event that involves a car journey. This is like the top right of the 'fourfold pattern'.
	346	The agency problem = when a manager's personal "incentives are misaligned with the objectives of the firm and its shareholders".
		"Regret is what you experience when you can most easily imagine yourself doing something other than what you did."
	347	"Regret is not the same as blame." If A) "Mr Brown never picks up hitchhikers. Yesterday he gave a man a ride and was robbed" and B) "Mr Smith frequently picks up hitchhikers. Yesterday he gave a man a ride and was robbed", then A) has the regret, but B) gets the blame.
	348	Regret is stronger when one took action than when one failed to, given the same final result. What matters is what the 'default' is, rather than 'commission versus omission'.
	349	"The asymmetry in the risk of regret favours conventional and risk-averse choices."
	351	"Airplanes, air conditioning, antibiotics, automobiles, chlorine, the measles vaccine, open-heart surgery, radio, refrigeration, smallpox vaccine and X-rays" - all would have fallen foul of the European 'precautionary principle' if that were interpreted strictly.
		"Susceptibility to regret, like susceptibility to fainting spells, is a fact of life to which one must adopt."
	354	"Poignancy (a close cousin of regret) is a counterfactual feeling, which is evoked because the thought of 'if only ...' comes readily to mind", (i.e. we didn't make the choice, and the thing just happened).
	355	Reversal = when a choice is inconsistent, depending on how it is evaluated, and what is 'salient'.
	358	Thinking more favourably of dolphins than of ferrets, snails or carp might affect how much people donate to a conservation charity.
	358-9	Compared with the above case, what about donations towards skin cancer check-ups for farm workers? If we are presented with the two cases together, our donations might be different than if the cases were presented separately.
	360	In this regard, Hsee proposed an evaluability hypothesis - that we don't use certain data for making a a choice unless we can compare it against its value in a competing case.
	361	Jurors in the USA who assess damages are expressly forbidden to compare with other cases. This seems crazy, as there will be many 'reversals' when many awards are reviewed later.
		In the USA, Occupational Health and Safety penalties related to worker safety are capped at $7,000; for violation of the Bird Conservation Act the cap is $25,000.
	363	In the 2006 Soccer World Cup, do the statements "Italy won" and "France lost" have equivalent meaning? And "What do we mean by meaning?"
	364	"Losses evoke stronger negative feelings than costs" - so people buy lottery tickets
		"People will more readily forgo a discount than pay a surcharge."
	366	Neuro-economics = "what a person's brain does (physically) when he/she makes decisions".
		Emotion evoked by a word, e.g. KEEP or LOSE, can 'leak' into our final choice.
	367	"Re-framing is effortful and System 2 is normally lazy."
	368	"Preferences can reverse with different framings" (e.g. of Tversky and DK's 'Asian disease problem').
	372	The 'mpg illusion': Assuming the same annual mileage, an improvement from 12 to 14 mpg is better than one from 30 to 40 mpg, even though it's only 2 more mpg. We get the correct answer if we look at it using litres per 100 kilometres.
Part V-	377	There's a difference between experienced utility and decision utility. The first is a measure of 'subjective well-being', while the second is more objective, maybe an outsider's view on "what's best for you". For a slide show covering this and most things in Part 5, see this web page.
Two Selves	379-81	In DK's example of 'no-anaesthetic colonoscopy', which was the right utility - the patient's memory of pain, or the total amount of pain incorporating how long it lasted?
	381	The two selves are the 'experiencing self' (not duration-dependent, e.g. "Does it hurt now?") and the 'remembering self' ("How was it, on the whole?"). DK talks about the "tyranny of the remembering self" (see p 385).
	383	Evolution may or may not have "designed animals to store integrals" (i.e. of our pain over time).
	385	"Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong" (or concentrate only on peak intensities).
		Because a failed marriage ended badly, it does not mean it was all bad. The good part might in fact have lasted 10 times as long as the bad.
	387	A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing (e.g. Traviata). It's the same with people's life stories - even if these are later spoilt by revelation of the truth (e.g. Churchill)
	388	"Peaks [RT: of feeling] and ends [RT: of phases] matter but duration does not."
		"Resorts offer restorative relaxation; tourism is about helping people construct stories and collect memories" (hence "frenetic picture taking").
	390	"Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self; and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me."
		"She is an Alzheimer's patient. She no longer maintains a narrative of her life, but her experiencing self is still sensitive to beauty and gentleness."
	392	Happy experience can come through a 'flow', as with artists [RT: in my case, drawing imaginary maps; there's also crosswords and Sudoku!]. A flow can be defined as "a situation in which 'X' would wish to continue in total absorption in a task - interruptions are not welcome". See also this diagram and this.
		DK and colleagues tried experience sampling by prompting subjects by mobile phone to record their feelings at the time.
	392-3	More successful was their Day Reconstruction Method or DRM. The idea is to "re-live the previous day in detail, breaking it up into episodes like scenes in a film".
	393	They invented the U-index - the percentage of the time in a 16-hour day that a person felt they were in an unpleasant state - so it's duration-dependent.
	394	In a US mid-west city, women clocked 29% for the morning commute, 27% for work, 24% for child care, 18% for housework, 12% for socializing, 12% for TV watching and 5% for sex. The figures were 6% higher on weekdays than weekends.
		"Frenchwomen spend less time with their children but enjoy it more, perhaps because they have access to child care and spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities."
		"Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to."
	396	"Religious participation also has relatively greater favourable impact on both positive affect and stress reduction than on life evaluation. Surprisingly, however, religion provides no reduction of feelings of depression or worry.
		"... Being rich (income over $75,000 p.a.) may enhance one's life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being."
	397	"Life satisfaction is not a flawed measure of their (our) well-being ... it is something else entirely."
	398	People's satisfaction graph each year before and after marriage peaks at marriage! (See the slides for more comment on this.)
	400	"The score that you quickly assign to your life is determined by a small sample of highly available ideas, not by a careful weighting of the domains of your life."
		"In the DRM studies, there was no overall difference in experienced well-being between women who lived with a mate and women who did not."
	401	"Both experienced happiness and life satisfaction are largely determined by the genetics of temperament."
	402	A lot depends on one's goals and whether or not one achieves them; so "exclusive focus on experienced well-being is not tenable". A hybrid is needed.
		The  focusing illusion = "any aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation".
	403	It's like the better weather in California [RT: or Adelaide in my case]. It isn't all (that matters).
	404-5	Adaptation to a new environment (e.g. a move to California, becoming a paraplegic, [RT: winning a lottery]) only causes a temporary blip in experienced well-being.
	406	Mis-wanting = "bad choices that arise from errors of affective forecasting". For more, see this page.
		"The focusing illusion creates a bias in favour of goods and experiences that are initially exciting, even if they will eventually lose their appeal. Time is neglected, causing experiences that will retain their attention value in the long term to be appreciated less than they deserve to be."
Conclusion	408	DK distinguishes 2 'characters', System 1 and System 2; 2 species, 'Econs' and 'Humans'; and 2 selves, 'experiencing' and 'remembering'.
	409	"The central fact of our existence is that time is the ultimate finite resource, but the remembering self ignores that reality."
		"Regret is the verdict of the remembering self."
	412	"For behavioural economists, however, freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them."
	413	Thaler & Sunstein published in 2008 the book 'Nudge', advocating " 'libertarian paternalism', in which the state and other institutions are allowed to 'nudge' people to make decisions that serve their (the people's) own long-term interests". An example would be giving the default of joining a pension plan, but allowing the individual to tick a box to opt out.
		Nudge requires firms to offer contracts that are sufficiently simple to be read and understood by Human customers.
	414	The 'UK's Behavioural Insights Team' (to which Thaler is advisor) is popularly known as the 'Nudge Unit'.
	414-5	USA food adverts are required, if they say '90% fat free', to also say '10% fat', "in lettering of the same color, size and typeface, and on the same color background as the statement of lean percentage".
	415	"You will believe the story you make up." [RT: yes, 'I believe in Fire Island', but I don't think it's as real as (say) New Zealand.]
	416	"System 1 registers the cognitive ease with which it processes information, but it does not generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable."
	417	"Recognize that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2."
		"It is much easier to recognize a minefield when you observe others wandering into it, than when you are about to do so."
	418	"Organizations can also encourage a culture in which people watch out for one another as they approach minefields."
		"There is a direct link from more precise gossip at the water cooler to better decisions. Decision makers are sometimes better able to imagine the voice of present gossipers and future critics than to hear the hesitant voice of their own doubts."
		"They will make better choices when they trust their critics to be sophisticated and fair, and when they expect their decision to be judged by how it was made, not only by how it turned out."

Reflections

This is one of the most life-relevant books I have ever read. It probably repeats a lot of Kahneman's (and Tversky's) previous work, but seems to have drawn the many threads of that work together.

The question that I am left with is "Shouldn't we be teaching this as part of a complete education?" Many people mentioned in the book seem to have been amazingly surprised by most of the experimental results and ideas.

As an obsessive - and maybe paranoid - opponent of bullshit, I feel that we, as the receivers of messages, are just not up to scratch in recognizing what is going on around us. Clearly, some politicians, advertisers, and various motivational speakers know how to hoodwink us; they know how to appeal to our intuitive selves (System 1) without disturbing our reflective and analytical selves (System 2). We need to ask ourselves more often what Mr Spock would say.

Links

The links below lead to the other components of  PLOVER

This version updated on 10^th November 2023