The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships by Clifford Nass and Corina Yen.
A colleague of mine recommended this book but even before reading it I said - "The influence of Daniel Kahneman's wisdom will far reaching effects in all our lives."
This book captures zillion social science experiments and its worth a read if haven't read any psychology books in a decade or so.
So here are few reviews of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow which come out in 2011:
David Brooks, NYT:
I’d like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results.
The Economist:
As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be. Often hailed as the father of behavioural economics (with Tversky as co-parent), his work has influenced a range of disciplines and has even inspired some policy. But the true consequences of his findings are only starting to emerge. When he presents the poor victims of his experiments with conclusive proof of their errors, the typical reaction is not a chastened pledge to shape up, but confused silence, followed by business as usual. No one likes to be told he is wrong.
New Yorker:
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Kahneman and Tversky. Like Darwin, they helped to dismantle a longstanding myth of human exceptionalism. Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine.
This new book will certainly accomplish that—Kahneman has given us a new set of labels for our shortcomings. But his greatest legacy, perhaps, is also his bleakest: By categorizing our cognitive flaws, documenting not just our errors but also their embarrassing predictability, he has revealed the hollowness of a very ancient aspiration. Knowing thyself is not enough. Not even close.
A colleague of mine recommended this book but even before reading it I said - "The influence of Daniel Kahneman's wisdom will far reaching effects in all our lives."
This book captures zillion social science experiments and its worth a read if haven't read any psychology books in a decade or so.
So here are few reviews of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow which come out in 2011:
David Brooks, NYT:
I’d like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results.
The Economist:
As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be. Often hailed as the father of behavioural economics (with Tversky as co-parent), his work has influenced a range of disciplines and has even inspired some policy. But the true consequences of his findings are only starting to emerge. When he presents the poor victims of his experiments with conclusive proof of their errors, the typical reaction is not a chastened pledge to shape up, but confused silence, followed by business as usual. No one likes to be told he is wrong.
New Yorker:
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Kahneman and Tversky. Like Darwin, they helped to dismantle a longstanding myth of human exceptionalism. Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine.
This new book will certainly accomplish that—Kahneman has given us a new set of labels for our shortcomings. But his greatest legacy, perhaps, is also his bleakest: By categorizing our cognitive flaws, documenting not just our errors but also their embarrassing predictability, he has revealed the hollowness of a very ancient aspiration. Knowing thyself is not enough. Not even close.
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