One of my heroes, Daniel Kahneman, passed away last month at the age of 90. Ever since I heard his talk on YouTube on “Marvels and flaws of human intuition” sometime in 2009, I became his fan. I listened to the talk like how people listen to a music album again and again. A couple of years later, his book “Thinking, fast and slow” was published and soon he became a celebrity. I continued to listen to his interviews. I ended up using the biased-agent model rather than the rational-agent model in all my work related to innovation capacity & culture building, design thinking, and mindfulness. In this article, I would like to present four of my favourite quotes from Kahneman.
Rational agent model is a non-starter: I remember
hearing this from Kahneman in multiple interviews over the past decade and it
created a deep impression in my mind. He said in this
interview last year (April 14, 2023): “Consistency of beliefs and
preferences, which are the essence of rationality in that model — it's
important to see what it implies. It's not the same thing as reasoning
correctly, that is, of saying two things that are consistent with each other in
the same conversation. It's that your beliefs, the whole system, your beliefs
and preferences, taken one at a time, make up a consistent system. And that is
psychologically a non-starter. That's simply because our beliefs and our
preferences are so context-dependent and the context is highly specific and
momentary, that this type of consistency is not conceivable.” So beautifully
put.
Cognitive biases act like optical illusions: I mentioned
this quote along with the cartoon below three years ago while presenting a
working definition of mindfulness. In “Thinking, fast and slow” he says “Cognitive
illusions can be more stubborn than visual illusions”. Kahneman is not
suggesting that we don’t change our mind. He says, “To
a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about
anything that matters." And, he elaborates this with, “I think I'm
actually known for changing my mind. This is one of the traits that all my
collaborators complain about, because I keep changing my mind. But I keep
changing my mind about small things. Then what I discovered actually, in part
while preparing that talk on adversarial collaboration, there are things on
which I just won't change my mind. Some of these I've believed since I was 17
or 18, so certainly are not going to change now.” We could be deeply
attached to a religion, national identity, political ideologies, and even
scientific theories. My guess is that Kahneman would have been deeply saddened
by the way Israel-Gaza conflict has unfolded since the last October,
demonstrating the stubbornness of cognitive illusions.
Focus on the process, not the outcome: We live in a world
where successful outcome is worshipped. Individual net worth, startup valuations, election
results, winning IPLs, competitive exam scores, your position, and possessions,
etc. Schools teaching entrepreneurship have a vision of producing a certain
number of unicorns. Kahneman knew that this lopsided emphasis on outcome is a
mistake. He said, “The key feature of
decision-making under uncertainty is that there is no perfect correlation between the quality of decisions and quality
of outcomes. You could make a good decision and fail and you could make a bad
decision and succeed.” And he advises later in the talk, “Try to focus
on the process, and not on the outcome”. For more on this, check out my blog “Rewarding
innovation: process vs outcome”.
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