Thinking, Fast and Slow

Kahneman's account of the two systems (fast, associative intuition and slow, effortful reasoning) is the load-bearing wall under most of behavioral economics. For the Atlas, the durable contribution is the catalogue of predictable errors: anchoring, loss aversion, the planning fallacy. Organizations are built from these errors at scale.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.

Also marked: the section on the focusing illusion, and the premortem technique. (Draft placeholder selection.)

I stopped treating behavior as preference and started treating it as architecture. When a policy fails or a queue forms differently in a different country, the interesting question is no longer what people want; it is what the structure around them made effortless.