Thinking Fast, and Slow - legacy of Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman dedicated his life to understanding people, their decisions, and why they make them. While analytics and statistics are data-driven processes, Kahneman reminded us that those processes ultimately are put before human decision-makers who are not necessarily bound by logic. His key insight, across the many works over the decades, is that purported objectivity and the cold logic of economics, built on the idea of individual agents making rational decisions was an exercise in faith. His work challenged the primacy of homo economics, it rehumanizing the study of economics by emphasizing the psychological forces exerting themselves on the decisionmaker. Kahneman's decades of work showed conclusively that no matter how clear and clear the data, how objective and rigorous the analysis, at the end of it all sits a human decisionmaker, flawed, complete with their biases, heuristic shortcuts, making decisions that feel logical but are in practice illogical and against the decision makers best interests. Thinking Fast, and Slow - despited replication challenges of some of its specific findings - sought to demonstrate that human beings possess two modes of thinking - slow and fast, and that more often than not, psychological and emotional factors mean our emotional brain is leading our rational brain by the proverbial nose. The world in which Kahneman wrote has only accelerated with the adoption of mass communications and mass media. The digital landscape in which we find ourselves today has sophisticated algorithms, hoovering up petabytes of data about users to activate our fast thinking, to get us to buy a product, sign a political petition, or send a knee-jerk reaction to breaking news into the digital aether. Data, the digital petroleum to which we are all addicted, has produced a world where decision-makers have never had more access to information, but precious little skill in maintaining an optimal state of mind for decision-making. As we mourn the passage of a preeminent thinker in behavioral economics and a pioneer in our understanding of decision-making, let us redouble our commitment to making slow decisions with fast data, not fast decisions with slow data.

by Adam Dobrer