Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman is a Genius. But if you know his work, you know that already.

A Nobel Prize winner, his work is weighty and a bit recondite into the bargain.

But hasn't he ignored the CHRISTIAN worldview, the world of good and evil? For isn't this book SPIRITUALLY rather trite, being addressed only to those sharpies who only wanna learn how to PLAY THE GAME?

Even if that ends in emotional bankruptcy?

I think so. So here's my own, Christian take on it:

We all live in a postmodernist, secular world now. When we come of age into that scenario, many of us learn a bit of caution. Unless this brutal coming of age makes us hip and glib.

So there are two ways of thinking now. One is thinking fast (hip and glib) and the other is thinking slow (religiously cautious). Thinking fast, in this book, is Optimal.

But here’s a point Kahneman neglects...

The hip and glib guys get hurt by those postmodernistic sharp edges more easily than the cautious guys. So the hip side becomes cautious, and, of course as they age, the hard knocks confuse them. They end up more confused and conflicted than the cautious ones most of the time.

Such is the Moral Levelling of Age.

The cautious folks believe in true love, and often eternal verities, though. We’ll call them the sheep, cause they follow their hip friends as only sheep serve. The hip guys, the planners, believe in basically nothing - they’re all fast talk and action. We’ll call them the goats: they love to butt heads with you.

As I say, this sheep/goat take on Thinking Fast is my own. Kahneman never goes there. Where he DOES go is to the value of experience in thinking fast:

To think fast, he says, experience is key. Experience gives us heuristic benchmarks.

The more experienced folks think faster. And because they’re so sure of the facts, we often ill-advisedly trust them.

But now back to my own take: hip guys HAVE some of this experience, because they are hip. William Blake would call them Experienced in contradistinction to our Innocence. It’s an Experience that can’t discern. It has no wisdom.

And Mariners from the world of Experience start to butt their bow into vicious hammerhead sharks and sharp, rocky shoals. Agressive Experience runs out of motivation early, unlike the restful boat of Innocence. Innocence isn’t conflictual. It BENDS rather than confronts.

It lives longer and healthier. And learns discernment.

Remember Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare? The lowly rabbit wins the race.

Just so, the meek inherit the Earth...

And a state of peaceful contentment.

Daniel Kahneman has his Nobel-winning theories -

But I have my own happy and elderly Discernment -

My Slow Thinking -

And my Peace of Mind.

Doesn't that count, too?