Book Review - Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is an excellent book. It's a perfect view to today's knowledge on people's behavior, decision making, rationality, economics and many more sides of human behavior. Author, Daniel Kahneman  is a Nobel prize winner on his work on economical psychology. He might be the best person in the world to tell about human behavior and it flaws on decision making.

This book is a really comprehensive view to everything around decision making and rationality. It looks the subject via so many points of view that it is bit exhausting. As an admired scientist he explains everything thoroughly and wants readers to understand the science behind each theory. This is both refreshing and laborious. I did appreciate, that backgrounds of each theory was explained to me, but sometimes it required an excellent concentration to really understand all that theory.

This is not an easy book to read. I don't recommend this to people who haven't ever read anything with a psychological view point. It is easier to read this, if you know at least something on human behavior. This book goes so much deeper on many theories that all the background information is useful.

I found the whole book really interesting, but professionally most interesting parts were about estimating, probabilities and flaws on those. Estimating in SW industry has been such a hot potato for a long time. This book gives one brilliant view from psychological view point, why we are so bad at estimating. Maybe there would be something to learn to all SW people in this book also.

As said, book digs deep to so many different areas, that there's no point on opening all of those up in here. If you are interested in human behavior in economic or decision making sense, you shouldn't miss this book. It is important book on that area. The most important I've read so far.

Even though Daniel Kahneman is a scientist, he writes in quite interesting way. Book is not hard to read for its text, but because it's so full of important insights. For a non native English speaker though, as I am, it was sometimes bit hard to follow. Still I got on track with some recaps. Reading this does take time, but it is worth every second.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen