Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

I n general, short of moving to a foreign country, reading fiction is the fastest way to get smarter.

However, if you have an immediate need to be smarter right now and only have time to read one book, make it the non-fiction Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is so mind-blowing and life-changing that there’s even a more recent Michael Lewis book about the bromance backstory that led to it.

Fans of Thinking, Fast and Slow have been known to hold up lines of flustered travelers boarding crowded planes to tell you how much they loved it. We view people who haven’t read it yet as liabilities, and recommend it to everybody we believe is smart enough to want to get smarter.

The book’s message is that even the smartest, most well-trained humans are god-awful at thinking rationally and knowing whether we really know something. Only when we realize that most of what’s in our brain is baloney can we begin to shed our accidentally stupid thoughts and conduct a methodical search for the truth.

This book will make you smarter, but until you read it just remember how dumb those of us who’ve read it know we all are!

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