Your Brain Is Lying to You Every Day | Daniel Kahneman

[00:00:01]Hello everyone.

[00:00:02]It's rare that a thinker or a book completely transforms the way that you see the world such that you can think of your life before and after you read that book.

[00:00:13]One such book for me was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.

[00:00:19]Uh in fact, I can remember very well how it was and when it was I came across this book.

[00:00:27]Uh I was working in the city at the time uh many lifetimes ago or or it seems to me now.

[00:00:35]Um and I was really into uh Freakonomics, if you remember that book.

[00:00:40]And there was a podcast. I was a regular listener to Freakonomics and I'm pretty sure that either they discussed Kahneman or they actually had Daniel Kahneman on as a guest. Uh this was all the way back in 2011 when uh Thinking Fast and Slow uh was actually published.

[00:00:59]And I remember that single podcast really confronted me with a completely new way of understanding human beings, human psychology, uh and indeed the world uh around me. It had a really profound impact uh on my thinking such that I used to joke that it basically ruined my life.

[00:01:23]Uh it also uh strongly influenced this book here, my third book, Shakespeare and Cognition.

[00:01:32]Arguably my most obscure book, but you can see that it directly influenced uh this book because the subtitle is Thinking Fast and Slow Through Character where I attempted to take uh the insights of Kahneman and into human psychology and heuristics and basically to see them in Shakespeare.

[00:01:57]Uh it also influenced uh uh my fifth book, this one here, Shakespeare's Moral Compass. Uh but I will talk more about that one tomorrow.

[00:02:08]So, let's get into then what it was or what it is that Daniel Kahneman had to say.

[00:02:19]Kahneman argues that there are two systems of thinking, the slow the slow and the fast uh as per the title of the book.

[00:02:27]Uh system one Uh and I should mention by the way that uh although uh I'm talking about Daniel Kahneman here uh in this video, almost everything in his work uh it was is co-signed by uh somebody his colleague Amos Tversky, and they were basically partners. They co-authored all of their books. Uh unfortunately um Tversky died. I think Kahneman is also now no longer with us. Uh and then after he died, Kahneman uh wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, uh you know, basically summing up their lifetimes' uh work. So, you know, you could you could really say Daniel Kahneman bracket and Amos uh Tversky.

[00:03:12]So, anyway, the system one thinking is fast and uh intuitive, and the system two is slow and deliberate.

[00:03:23]Uh now I can't quite remember. I can never remember which one is one and which one is two, but the fact is it doesn't matter. Okay? In this video, I'm going to call them one and two this way around. Maybe in the book he says them the other way around. Basically, doesn't matter. What you need to remember is one is fast and is based on intuition and emotion. The other is slow and deliberate and is based on cognitive rational thought.

[00:03:48]The system one thinking is automatic. It is emotional. It is effortless, and it runs constantly in the background. The system two is slow and deliberative, it is logical, effortful, and is used for complex reasoning, and it often defers to system one. Now, the key insight of Kahneman is that this system two, the slow, deliberative, effortful thought is hard. [snorts] Right? It requires effort.

[00:04:22]Think of a fairly complex sum. Okay? It doesn't have to be that complex, but something like 42 * 68. Okay? Now, my mental arithmetic is maybe not as good as yours because in order to work that out, I need to stop and I can't just do it in my head. I don't know my 42 times table or my 68 times table. So, I have to stop and actually try to calculate that, you know, using using my the my kind of rudimentary schoolboy mathematics. And maybe even I need to stop and actually write it out on paper.

[00:05:00]And >> [clears throat] >> if you don't believe that this takes a lot of effort, try to do a sum like that when you're walking along in the street, and you will find yourself stopping, actually physically stopping because the mental load is so much that you need to quote stop and think.

[00:05:20]Now, Kahneman's insight is that we, as human beings, are lazy, and we do everything and anything possible to avoid thinking like that because it's so much effort. We want to avoid the mental strain of doing 42 * 68, and therefore we use mental shortcuts, which he calls heuristics, to get out of it.

[00:05:44]And then he says that because of this fact most of the time in 95% of human life, right? Of of your life and anybody else's life, you actually rely on system one and not on system two. The times where you actually stop and do that slow cognitive load type thought uh is really a small really small minority of the time because we're relying on these shortcuts and trying to get out of it, okay?

[00:06:20]And this uh then brings him to identify lots of different heuristics, that is different shortcuts that the human brain takes to avoid thinking.

[00:06:36]Uh and he also talks about cognitive biases.

[00:06:40]Because system one relies on mental shortcuts called heuristics to make fast judgments, um and it does so because they're efficient, because they um you know, they save time, they save effort and so on and so forth.

[00:06:57]Uh they uh come to call these kind of cognitive biases, okay?

[00:07:05]And they are deeply wired into how we all think because basically most of the time we want to rely on the shortcut, as I've just said.

[00:07:16]Uh they produce systematic and predictable errors, these heuristics and cognitive biases, when judged and when viewed in the cold light of day.

[00:07:27]And in this lecture I want to uh kind of go through some of them. I also do that uh by the way in this uh I say it's my most obscure book because judging by the royalties, friends, yeah you know, um you know, some of some of my books have brought in lots of money for me. I'm not going to lie.

[00:07:49]This one, cup of coffee.

[00:07:51]But, in it, I I also outline uh lots of these uh cognitive uh cognitive, you know, I talk about dual process theory and heuristics and so on and so forth. So, I'm going to I'm going to give some of the things uh that I discuss in there, as well as uh Kahneman Kahneman's uh stuff as well. I go into a little bit more detail in this book uh because I had to kind of research it, essentially.

[00:08:18]Before we get there, speaking of research, I still have my summer sale on. It is still July. That means it is promo code scorcher, which gets you 25% off all courses. Buy it now. If you do the Trivium, you will be able to do Foundations of Logic and engage your system two slow thinking. You will actually be able to train yourself to slow think. Uh also, if you then want to completely bypass all of those lessons and hack into everybody else's fast thinking, you can pick up Foundations of Rhetoric on the same uh on the same package, Trivium, uh to and use uh the the knowledge that I'm about to give you here to your evil advantage, if you wish to. Uh but anyway, let us uh continue now with the lecture at hand.

[00:09:12]So, the first thing that Kahneman talks about uh very foundational to this way of thinking. And if you want to know the name of the broad area that uh he worked in, it was called or is called behavioral economics.

[00:09:30]Uh and its core insight really is this.

[00:09:34]Confirmation bias. The bias describes our tendency to seek out and interpret and remember information that already confirms our existing belief.

[00:09:49]We do not collect evidence, okay, and then draw inferences from the evidence like a good scientist would, uh and uh you know, derive our conclusions from hence.

[00:10:05]No. We start with our conclusions, and then we go looking for evidence for what we already believe. And then we systematically ignore the evidence that confounds that belief, or we explain it away.

[00:10:18]And we cherry-pick all of the things uh that we want to see.

[00:10:24]We often unconsciously flavor evidence that supports what we already think, even when contradictory evidence exists.

[00:10:34]This is a powerful driver of system one, reinforcing our initial intuitions and making it difficult to change our minds, even when presented with new facts.

[00:10:45]And confirmation bias, once you see it, is a real I mean, let me just bring myself up here.

[00:10:59]Once you see this, okay, you see it everywhere. You see it in everyone. You recognize it in yourself, and it's kind of annoying that you do it yourself, and then you start recognize it in everyone else. And then you start recognizing it in things like politics, and you start recognizing it everywhere.

[00:11:19]And uh when I So, when I said this book kind of ruined my life, it really threw me for a loop there for a couple of years, because I it it of shattered my faith in all [snorts] sorts of things.

[00:11:34]Because one of the things that Kahneman talks about is he says like look it's not just you who does this, it's everybody.

[00:11:42]Experts of all kinds, financial experts, economists, CEOs of companies, risk experts and analysts, doctors.

[00:11:56]Now you would like to think that your doctor is just rational is always rational.

[00:12:03]Like Dr. Spock, right? Like Mr. Spock from Star Trek, that he's purely logical and he's going by the evidence.

[00:12:11]Actually, and maybe you're a doctor yourself, so you might know this.

[00:12:16]So many times they work on intuition.

[00:12:20]What's worked before. They work on these mental shortcuts and heuristics.

[00:12:26]And they you know, they confirm their own biases, too.

[00:12:32]So and it and it you know, what is true of the doctor of the medical doctor goes doubly, triply for intellectuals and academics.

[00:12:44]So this, as you can imagine, wa- created something of a of an epistemic crisis in the at that point or we how old was I? 28 or 29 or 30 or something like that.

[00:12:59]In in the young me. I think I was 29 years old when I came or actually I was 28 when I heard that podcast and then I was 29 when the when the book came out.

[00:13:09]And it really did create it took me a long time to actually come to terms with this and in fact my entire intellectual journey, all of the books I've written, all of the all of the videos I've made on this channel, 2,000 plus, all of the videos I've made in this Great Thinker series probably would not have happened if Daniel Kahneman hadn't have thrown me for such a loop with these basic insights.

[00:13:39]And I have you know, I have mentioned before that Vilfredo Pareto in some ways came to this first because he talked about how human beings are non-rational and then they uh post hoc justify after the point. And he was talking about societies and political action, but Kahneman provides the evidence. He actually provides the empirical proof necessary to show that Pareto actually knew what he was talking about.

[00:14:11]Another heuristic that we use all the time is the availability heuristic.

[00:14:19]That is your awareness of some bit of information that you have been exposed to then kind of prejudices you to find a causal link between that thing and um any event that happens.

[00:14:38]And I remember vividly that Kahneman in the book uses the example of the capture of Saddam Hussein.

[00:14:46]And he said that the same newspaper ran two completely contradictory headlines on the day that Saddam Hussein was captured.

[00:14:54]One headline was basically um financial markets plummet, Saddam Hussein captured.

[00:15:02]And then the next headline was markets rally, Saddam Hussein captured.

[00:15:09]Now Kahneman's point is that the capture of Saddam Hussein was probably neither here nor there. It probably had no influence whatsoever on whether the markets went up or down on day, okay? Or maybe it had, I mean, who who knows?

[00:15:24]Maybe it had some, you know, marginal effect somewhere. But the fact is is the writers of that newspaper had no idea.

[00:15:32]What they knew is that the big thing that happened that day is that Saddam Hussein was captured. That was the available information.

[00:15:40]And they took that information and they put it together with what the markets were doing at that moment and they created a causal relationship between those two things because this is what the human mind does.

[00:15:56]Pareto says that humans are non-rational but they have a bias towards thinking themselves as rational beings.

[00:16:07]But do you understand this?

[00:16:10]Most of the time we're not rational.

[00:16:13]Okay? It is not rational to conclude that because Saddam Hussein was captured the markets have gone up or down.

[00:16:20]In the cold light of day, it's just a bit of information that you happen to have and because you know this, you're then making an inference from this second bit of information that you have.

[00:16:32]Actually the reason for the market being up or down that day could be any one of 150 different reasons.

[00:16:40]Thousands of different reasons.

[00:16:44]But we have a bias for thinking of we love to think of ourselves as rational, as reasonable as working from evidence.

[00:16:53]Even though we don't we love to think of ourselves and this is our self-image.

[00:16:58]And so hence we make these little just-so stories all the time, these little causal inferences.

[00:17:07]Um there are many other areas that you can see this. Okay?

[00:17:13]Another classic one is uh shark attacks.

[00:17:16]You know, everybody seen Jaws.

[00:17:19]Everybody's you know, certainly when I was a kid, Jaws was everywhere. The imminence of the shark attack.

[00:17:26]Now, the fact is, hardly anybody ever dies of a shark shark attack, whereas people die of car accidents every single day.

[00:17:32]And yet, the we feel the threat of the of the shark attack more.

[00:17:39]Because it is a um What does he call it? It is a high impact but low incident event.

[00:17:47]High impact, low incident.

[00:17:50]And because of that, we more coverage is given to it. Uh another example is a is a is a terrorist attack.

[00:17:57]Diabetes kills far more people than terrorist attacks, as does car accidents.

[00:18:04]Okay?

[00:18:05]But we don't really think of car accidents as an epidemic or as a you know, we don't declare like a war on it you know, the terrorist attack is front and center. It's given lots and lots of news coverage and is prescient as a threat.

[00:18:22]Whereas diabetes is not.

[00:18:25]Kind of over there somewhere it's just a statistic.

[00:18:29]>> [clears throat] >> We overestimate the risks of these great big disasters due to the high availability of the information. The plane crash, right? There's there's There's usually a plane crash somewhere.

[00:18:45]And therefore, it's close to close to mind, right? Whereas people die of heart disease every single day.

[00:18:53]So, it's less newsworthy.

[00:18:55]So, therefore, the plane crash, the terrorist attack, the shark attack, front and center. All of those things that happen all the time over there.

[00:19:05]Whereas your actual risk of dying of heart disease, diabetes, or of a car accident is greatly greatly higher than the plane crash, the terrorist attack, or the shark attack. Okay?

[00:19:16]But, this is the availability heuristic.

[00:19:20]One of the examples of the availability heuristic that I remember was uh the you know, back when I was uh teaching undergraduates on a regular basis, um the results came out, the third-year results, and uh it was my job at that time to be the uh I was the uh examinations officer, right? I was the examinations officer.

[00:19:48]And uh news came out that the way things were going to be marked that year were going to change. I think they'd brought in blind double marking such that um the supervisor of a dissertation could have no part in the marking of it, okay? This I think something like this had It was a change that was brought about.

[00:20:12]And um when the results came out, a lot of the students were disappointed that they had lower marks than they expected.

[00:20:19]And so, they complained, the students did, right? They complained en masse to say because there was a change in the rules, we have been marked unfairly compared to previous years.

[00:20:36]Let's get back to our availability heuristic because when I looked into it, I produced data on the last 10 years of results uh versus that year.

[00:20:49]And I had found that on average, that year group was actually up marginally by about 4 or 5% on average across the board uh versus previous years.

[00:21:01]Yet, the perception existed that they had lower marks because the available information was that the rules had changed.

[00:21:14]So, you can see how powerful this is.

[00:21:18]Even though the empirical fact, the fact is your marks were higher, the actual way of that most people processed it was marks were lower.

[00:21:33]Mind plays funny tricks.

[00:21:37]Then we have the representativeness heuristic.

[00:21:42]We judge probability by how much one thing resembles another, often ignoring base rates and statistical reality.

[00:21:50]This is called the Linda problem. Okay?

[00:21:53]People rate the statement Linda is a bank teller and a feminist activist as being more probable than the statement Linda is a bank teller, even though it is a logical impossibility.

[00:22:11]I'll repeat that. Linda is a bank teller and a feminist activist versus Linda is a bank teller. Now, why is it impossible, foundations of logic fans, for the first statement to be less to be more probable than the than the second statement?

[00:22:28]It is because the Venn diagram of people called Linda who are bank tellers is obviously going to be bigger than the than the one that is Linda being a bank teller and a feminist.

[00:22:40]Right? I mean, it's obvious.

[00:22:44]Yet, people systematically rated the first statement as more likely.

[00:22:50]Why? Maybe they could imagine Linda.

[00:22:53]Maybe they could, you know, they could picture Linda the feminist banker.

[00:22:57]Uh so, yeah. Uh also there's stereotyping. We match individuals to prototypes rather than weighing actual statistical frequencies leading to systemic mis- misjudgements.

[00:23:11]Uh and we ignore base rates. Even trained professionals overlook how common or rare a category is when a vivid description is provided.

[00:23:23]And there are more of these.

[00:23:26]Anchoring.

[00:23:28]The first piece of information we encounter is called an anchor.

[00:23:33]Experts Um sorry.

[00:23:37]This anchor exerts an outsized influence on all subsequent judgements.

[00:23:44]Even when it is entirely arbitrary.

[00:23:48]Okay, when asked whether Mount Everest is taller or shorter than 45,000 ft, people's estimates are dramatically higher than when the anchor is 8,000 ft.

[00:24:00]The number itself shifts our thinking regardless of its relevance. And uh I if I remember in the book, Kahneman goes into juries, right? And he he goes into various uh judgements that were made in different cases of law when certain things were judged against another. I seem to remember you know, uh what compensation should be given to this family who's lost a child versus what compensation should be given to a banker, for example. Now, if judged on their own, the amounts were drastically different depending on whether the other case was foregrounded.

[00:24:48]People don't like bankers. People do like children.

[00:24:53]Therefore, when the banker and the child were put together, people wanted to make sure that the family was getting more than the banker in compensation.

[00:25:04]Okay? Because it was it was acting as an anchor.

[00:25:08]This is uh very interesting.

[00:25:11]Uh it is also an interesting technique in negotiations.

[00:25:16]Now, one of the um things that I could see that Donald Trump was doing early on is that Donald Trump uses anchoring techniques all the time uh when he negotiates.

[00:25:29]Uh now, I don't want to [clears throat] get bogged down into uh into the kind of um specifics of Trump, but he was very good at setting down a kind of marker. His tactic was typically to start with something seemingly insane, right? All the way over here somewhere.

[00:25:50]Something there something extreme His anchor was really extreme.

[00:25:54]And then when the actual negotiation comes, he he kind of moves back to some much more moderate moderate position.

[00:26:01]So, Donald Trump does it again and again.

[00:26:04]So, for example, you know, I'm going to build a beautiful great wall, right?

[00:26:07]Well, it ended up being ended up being a fence or whatever else. The fact is something's there now and it wasn't there before.

[00:26:14]Right? But he and what he did through his anchoring technique is he is he set the base he set the base of where the conversation was going to be. He anchored it.

[00:26:27]Another thing that uh Kahneman and Tversky found was that people really really don't like making losses.

[00:26:39]Uh in fact, losses hurt roughly twice as much as the equivalent gains feel good.

[00:26:46]So, therefore, people have a loss aversion.

[00:26:49]Right? They Here there is the pleasure of the gaining £100 versus the pain of losing £100.

[00:26:58]People really don't like the loss.

[00:27:01]And they therefore they try to minimize loss as much as they can. They are more risk averse.

[00:27:08]They are loss averse.

[00:27:10]Holding on, right? This asymmetry between the pleasure of gain versus the pain of loss has far-reaching consequences, especially in the world of finance.

[00:27:22]This means people hold on to losses or losing investments for far too long.

[00:27:28]Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.

[00:27:31]Uh they demand more to sell something that you than you'd pay to buy it.

[00:27:38]Uh they are swayed by framing since the same outcome feels very different depending on whether it is presented as a gain or a loss.

[00:27:49]Now, this basic principle I talked about at length in my video on economic cost from a couple of months back.

[00:27:57]If you go back and or type in cost, right, you will see there's a whole video where I talk about this psychological phenomenon of cost.

[00:28:08]Uh the reason it's so powerful is because loss aversion is actually much that pain feeling is much stronger than the than the gain feeling, roughly twice as much.

[00:28:23]Another problem that we as human beings have is systematic overconfidence.

[00:28:32]Now, you might be saying, "Well, that's all right for you to say, 'Hey, hey, you're a very arrogant individual. You know, you rate yourself you're up yourself, okay?'"

[00:28:39]I'm not like that. You You might be like that, but I'm not like that. But the the trouble is everybody's like this, okay?

[00:28:47]Most people are far more confident in their beliefs, in their predictions, in their abilities than any rational evidence justifies.

[00:28:58]Okay?

[00:28:59]We have a planning fallacy where we consistently underestimate how long tasks will take and how much they will cost.

[00:29:08]There is the illusion of validity. We believe that our judgments are more accurate than they objectively are.

[00:29:16]Uh even in the domain of our own expertise.

[00:29:19]And experts have overconfidence because specialized knowledge does not protect against overconfidence.

[00:29:28]Um in fact, in many cases, in many fields, it can amplify overconfidence.

[00:29:34]Uh and because of all of that, because of all of these things, um people like really overrate their own input into things and they underrate other people's input into things. One of the things Kahneman talks about is studies done into uh uh people working on a team project, for example, who are then asked to rate their own input versus other people's input.

[00:30:00]And people literally, systematically overrate their own input. Why?

[00:30:08]Because availability heuristic, they can see that, they can't see what the other people are doing, because they're over overconfident, they assume that their input is really good.

[00:30:20]Uh they underrate what other people are doing.

[00:30:23]Uh and and so be it, you know, so on and so forth.

[00:30:27]>> [snorts] >> Uh and the thing is is that everybody watching this will be thinking, "Yeah, yeah, but I'm one of the special ones, right?" But the thing is everybody thinks that. This And this is This is really what uh Tversky and Kahneman found in many of their studies that were reproduced by other people.

[00:30:48]Uh, I know there was some crisis of reproduction, right? But, some of these ones were actually reproduced. Right?

[00:30:56]The The people over overrating themselves systematically.

[00:31:00]Um, and, you know, you can you can see this on the internet. You can see this on the internet uh so often, right?

[00:31:09]But, back in the days when I was on Twitter, not on there anymore, thank god, but back when I was, occasionally, I would share a little bit of cooking or something. I was I was making something and I would share a couple of pictures.

[00:31:23]And um all of a sudden everybody uh in my comments were like uh three-star Michelin chefs.

[00:31:31]Everybody in my coffee Everybody in my comments uh you know, um bought the kind of finest organic cheeses and uh you know, had had their own personal cave in which to age that cheese and you know, they made every single sauce themselves. They've never ever bought, you know, uh like a tin of tomatoes or something like that. They don't shop at the supermarket. They only shop at, you know, artisanal farm shops.

[00:32:01]All of this sort of stuff.

[00:32:03]Uh, this sort of thing is one of the ways in which this tendency of people manifests itself because they they just kind of uh they have a habit of like seeing themselves in the best possible light and then underrating everybody else. Um, anyway.

[00:32:26]Another core idea in Kahneman is what you see is all there is.

[00:32:34]The core idea is system one builds a coherent narrative from whatever information is available immediately available and it does not pause to ask what it might be missing.

[00:32:45]The less we know, the more confidently we may feel because a small set of consistent clues creates a tidy story with no obvious gaps.

[00:32:56]Here you get kind of perfect storm of limited information, overconfident judgment, and this coherent narrative that system one constructs which quickly kind of covers over all of the all of the gaps.

[00:33:14]And I mean, I'll talk more about this tomorrow.

[00:33:19]Spoilers everyone, but tomorrow we're going to be talking about Jonathan Haidt.

[00:33:23]But what then can happen is that you know, the slower cognitive rational mind can actually start to make excuses for all of this.

[00:33:34]Right? Rather than holding system one to account and saying, "Hold on system one, you are full of you are absolutely full of it.

[00:33:43]You don't know that. You don't know this." Right? Rather than poking holes, system two comes along and says, "You know what? I'm going to give a little helping hand to all of this. I'm going to come up with even more BS that justifies all these stories that you're telling.

[00:34:02]I'm going to I'm going to redouble it.

[00:34:05]I'm going to I'm going to write and you can see this all the time, right? In every walk of life where human beings are involved.

[00:34:15]You see people do this.

[00:34:20]Justifying after the fact even when it's glaringly obvious that these things that Kahneman is talking about have gone on.

[00:34:33]So, what do we do about all of this?

[00:34:37]Right? Kahneman has presented a set of facts about human behavior and human thinking.

[00:34:43]So, knowing all of this, what do we do about it?

[00:34:46]And Kahneman says, well, first thing we need to do is to recognize these bias.

[00:34:51]Like, recognize that we're all like this. Recognize that we engage in confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, that we're overconfident in our assertions and judgments, and that we, you know, that we're lazy, and we avoid rational thinking wherever we can.

[00:35:09]Doing this is the first step towards better judgment.

[00:35:12]Yet, awareness alone is rarely enough, because system one continues to generate intuitive answers even when we, the rational brain, knows better.

[00:35:23]So, overriding it requires time, motivation, cognitive resources, uh and conditions that are often in very short supply.

[00:35:33]You know, the goal is to preserve system one's value.

[00:35:36]So, make no mistake, we couldn't function without these heuristics. We couldn't function without like, the world couldn't function without the things that Kahneman's outlining here.

[00:35:47]And yet, we don't want to fall into systematic error as a result of these things. In the worst cases, right? In the worst cases, a system that cannot stop and think, that, you know, just let everybody's system one's almost be an autopilot, uh ends up leading to systematic error.

[00:36:18]I actually talked about this uh in a recent paper, uh where I talked about uh uh the in defense of value-free analysis, I think it was called. You can look that up. Uh it's a recent academic paper.

[00:36:34]Uh where I I talked about what happens if institutions and and governments even fall into this kind of systematic fast thinking.

[00:36:47]Where there's no corrective, there's no countervailing voices, everything's on autopilot.

[00:36:53]So, you have to be able to slow down and let system two do its thing once in a while.

[00:37:00]Um I will say that Kahneman you could argue takes this in also a slightly dark direction because uh much like Edward Bernays before him and various other people, Kahneman basically says like, "Well, look, because of all of these systematic biases, because human beings are like that, because they respond to authority and therefore they can kind of be nudged.

[00:37:31]They can kind of be nudged.

[00:37:33]Right? They're In fact, what once we know that human beings are like this, we know what they respond to.

[00:37:40]And therefore we can the authorities or governments or organizations can use this knowledge to their advantage to kind of push people back in line or to um you know, to play on their play on their various system ones.

[00:37:58]And um Kahneman in some areas seems to justify uh I guess what you'd call mass manipulation or he seems to justify, you know, at the very least nudging units.

[00:38:14]There was another book written, Nudge, that was influenced by a lot of this sort of stuff.

[00:38:18]And certainly it was influential in management circles. So, uh much like so many of the things I've discussed, these insights, you know, I like to utilize them to kind of for the what I like to call the sovereign individual.

[00:38:34]Go over to my academic age of mindset channel. There's all all sorts of material on how you can kind of make yourself better, improve your life, and actually use some of these psychological hacks or methods or techniques to make better change in your own life.

[00:38:52]That's one side of it.

[00:38:54]The other side of it is you know, well, what happens if this knowledge falls into the hands of management, which it has, or into the government, or into mass organizations, uh which it has.

[00:39:09]Uh they will try to use this knowledge to their advantage as well.

[00:39:16]Where there is knowledge, there is power. Maybe one day I'll talk about Foucault as well, but uh so yeah, all of these videos have this kind of double-edged sword to them.

[00:39:26]Uh you know, just as Benayoun's was the flip side of Althusser, uh Kahneman Kahneman has his own kind of Jekyll and Hyde variants as well, depending on how you see it. I mean, maybe you agree with him.

[00:39:42]Right? Maybe you agree with him that people need to be nudged uh for their own safety.

[00:39:48]That's how he frames it. He's like, "For their own safety, people need to kind of be told cuz they're stupid at the end of the day.

[00:39:56]They're stupid. Human beings are stupid, so they need they need guidance."

[00:40:00]Basically, more or less what Kahneman is saying.

[00:40:04]Do I disagree with him?

[00:40:07]Well, maybe forget about what I think. What do you think? Do you agree with Kahneman or not?

[00:40:14]Uh to some extent, he's right. You know, mean, to some extent I think of all Think of all like um little things, right? I can see there's a there's a air freshener kind of air freshener over there.

[00:40:27]And on the back of there it's got written poison, flammable, don't squirt this up your nose. Like, don't drink this.

[00:40:35]Don't set fire to it.

[00:40:37]Now, because all of you aren't, you know, because we all rate ourselves very highly and we're all overconfident. I'm like, of course I'd never do that. Of course I would. Of course I'd never do that.

[00:40:50]And yet think of how many stupid people there are.

[00:40:54]And think of what would happen if that wasn't written on that bottle.

[00:40:58]Why is it written on that bottle?

[00:41:01]Okay? So, there there is an extent to which Kahneman has a point uh in much of what he's saying. And it's not necessarily dark, it could actually be good, right? And I could actually agree with him or you could agree with him.

[00:41:15]But there's always the question of, well, how far do you take it though?

[00:41:19]How far do you take it though?

[00:41:21]How far do you nudge people?

[00:41:23]How far do you assume that they're stupid and need guidance?

[00:41:28]What happens if the powers that be get carried away with this knowledge and these powers?

[00:41:36]Anyway, these are all questions for you to ponder.

[00:41:40]Maybe you can spend some time and you can stop and utilize your system to slow cognitive thinking, to really think about this rather than rather than kind of giving me your rather than do an exercise today, right?

[00:41:55]Rather than giving me your snapshot comment, oh, it's a rubbish yeah rather take 10 minutes.

[00:42:04]Think about what you want to say for 10 whole minutes. And only then write.

[00:42:09]And see the difference in the initial gut level reaction and the thing that you want to say after 10 minutes.

[00:42:20]You see on this level, Daniel Kahneman can help everybody.

[00:42:24]All right. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow another one of the thinkers who going to ruin my life, Jonathan Haidt. Uh we will have a look at him then.

[00:42:33]For now, pick up a course at the Academic Agency. It's promo code Scorch and I'll see you all then.

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