Too many people raved about it, so I never read "Thinking, Fast and Slow." (As in 'Oh, you just *have* to read Kahneman's book!!') It's a sidecar to the Lebowitz principle.

Sometimes these principles can protect us.

As in 'Oh, you just *have* to read Kahneman's book!!') It's a sidecar to the Lebowitz principle. ~ Crid at May 27, 2021 4:31 AM

Didn't Malcolm Gladwell already write the book about thinking that "you just have to read?"

Maybe... As Gladwell might say, lemme think about it for 10,000 hours.

His pieces are like potato chips, distracting in the moment, but you'd never remember any particular one of them.

I got nothing against Gladwell… He amuses people. But the ONE TIME I wanted to cite something from one of his pieces, the anecdote had stuck in memory as having been written by Michael Lewis> It took about two years to find the actual passage… Which was saved on my computer all along!:

Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information.
by Malcolm Gladwell January 8, 2007

Here again, though, the lessons of the Enron case aren’t nearly so straightforward. The public became aware of the nature of these S.P.E.s through the reporting of several of Weil’s colleagues at the Wall Street Journal—principally John Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith—starting in the late summer of 2001. And how was Emshwiller tipped off to Enron’s problems? The same way Jonathan Weil and Jim Chanos were: he read what Enron had reported in its own public filings.

When Weil had finished his reporting, he called Enron for comment. “They had their chief accounting officer and six or seven people fly up to Dallas,” Weil says. They met in a conference room at the Journal’s offices. The Enron officials acknowledged that the money they said they earned was virtually all money that they hoped to earn. Weil and the Enron officials then had a long conversation about how certain Enron was about its estimates of future earnings. “They were telling me how brilliant the people who put together their mathematical models were,” Weil says. “These were M.I.T. Ph.D.s. I said, ‘Were your mathematical models last year telling you that the California electricity markets would be going berserk this year? No? Why not?’ They said, ‘Well, this is one of those crazy events.’ It was late September, 2000, so I said, ‘Who do you think is going to win? Bush or Gore?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’ I said, ‘Don’t you think it will make a difference to the market whether you have an environmentalist Democrat in the White House or a Texas oil man?” It was all very civil. “There was no dispute about the numbers,” Weil went on. “There was only a difference in how you should interpret them.”

Of all the moments in the Enron unravelling, this meeting is surely the strangest. The prosecutor in the Enron case told the jury to send Jeffrey Skilling to prison because Enron had hidden the truth: You’re “entitled to be told what the financial condition of the company is,” the prosecutor had said. But what truth was Enron hiding here? Everything Weil learned for his Enron exposé came from Enron, and when he wanted to confirm his numbers the company’s executives got on a plane and sat down with him in a conference room in Dallas.

Nixon never went to see Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post. He hid in the White House.

A good news / bad news joke.