In Isaiah Berlin's typology, I think I've leant more towards the hedgehog for most of my life, though with increased fox-like tendencies over the last few years - so, generally, it's been big ideas with the potential to seemingly explain everything that have tended to really capture my attention. First, there was Sartre's take on existentialism, his articulation of the underlying knot of freedom, responsibility, authenticity and angst resonating as both description and design for life. Then at uni came postmodernism and deconstruction, meanings I pursued through a series of texts, seminars etc with a zeal only sharpened by the elusive, riddling nature of the insights in play (some of my enduring memories of university involve puzzling over and over through various passages of Derrida). And finally, overlapping and circling back, the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, which - individually and collectively - underlaid all of those others.
(I've put the political to one side here, for a couple of reasons. Those views were developing along related, but in some respects fairly separate tracks, from what felt at the time like more personal and specifically moral - as opposed to intellectual - values.)
Anyway, more recently, for a while now I've been increasingly drawn to some contemporary streams that have in common an emphasis on the cognitive biases and other factors limiting human rationality, much of it wrapped up under the behavioural economics rubric. A different kind of 'big idea' from those that preoccupied me through, I guess, my late teens and then most of my twenties - indeed, maybe a set of ideas that go better with a fox-like outlook (whereas I guess that capital-letter Phenomenology, Existentialism and Postmodernism present more as hedgehog systems, subject (ha) to caveats about postmodernism, hedgehog-fox distinction, and the possibility of a metaphysics of absence) - but what behavioural economics has in common with those others is an applicability to both a wider social context and individual choices, actions and experience, an argument about how the two spheres are inherently connected, and (for me) the promise, if realised, of better ways of understanding and being, both for myself and much more widely.
One consequence of all this for my reading of Thinking, Fast and Slow - I've been through it twice now over the last few months or so - is that much of it was already familiar, and more than that, that I'd already accepted many of its premises; part of the field's appeal for me is that its picture of the ways that individuals actually make decisions, systematic and predictable biases and all, is intuitively plausible, and certainly more so than the rational actor of traditional economics (in the language of behavioural economics, its actors are Humans rather than Econs). Plus, much of the empirical basis for the book's analysis has now been in wide circulation for some time now, to the extent that much of it has now assumed the status of common sense, at least in some circles - the notion of confirmation bias comes to mind.
So for me, the real value of the book came from four elements. First, the systematic way that it lays out this familiar terrain of heuristics, biases and other departures from rational decision-making models and assumptions and shows how the framework - story - provided by Kahneman's 'two systems' account of the mind is able to provide a meta-explanation (to a certain extent) of those interesting observations and findings. Second, its treatment of prospect theory, which I hadn't previously grappled with properly, and again in a wider context that helps to make sense of familiar elements like loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity to gains and losses, and endowment and other related effects. Third, the distinction between the experiencing and the remembering selves and hints of what this might mean in seeking to design societies that maximise their members' wellbeing. And fourth, the sheer conceptual richness of the whole, in bringing together all of these ideas and coining some new ones (WYSIATI). A book, I imagine, that I'll return to in future, for particular sections or in full - and with interest to see what else it leads to.
(I've put the political to one side here, for a couple of reasons. Those views were developing along related, but in some respects fairly separate tracks, from what felt at the time like more personal and specifically moral - as opposed to intellectual - values.)
Anyway, more recently, for a while now I've been increasingly drawn to some contemporary streams that have in common an emphasis on the cognitive biases and other factors limiting human rationality, much of it wrapped up under the behavioural economics rubric. A different kind of 'big idea' from those that preoccupied me through, I guess, my late teens and then most of my twenties - indeed, maybe a set of ideas that go better with a fox-like outlook (whereas I guess that capital-letter Phenomenology, Existentialism and Postmodernism present more as hedgehog systems, subject (ha) to caveats about postmodernism, hedgehog-fox distinction, and the possibility of a metaphysics of absence) - but what behavioural economics has in common with those others is an applicability to both a wider social context and individual choices, actions and experience, an argument about how the two spheres are inherently connected, and (for me) the promise, if realised, of better ways of understanding and being, both for myself and much more widely.
One consequence of all this for my reading of Thinking, Fast and Slow - I've been through it twice now over the last few months or so - is that much of it was already familiar, and more than that, that I'd already accepted many of its premises; part of the field's appeal for me is that its picture of the ways that individuals actually make decisions, systematic and predictable biases and all, is intuitively plausible, and certainly more so than the rational actor of traditional economics (in the language of behavioural economics, its actors are Humans rather than Econs). Plus, much of the empirical basis for the book's analysis has now been in wide circulation for some time now, to the extent that much of it has now assumed the status of common sense, at least in some circles - the notion of confirmation bias comes to mind.
So for me, the real value of the book came from four elements. First, the systematic way that it lays out this familiar terrain of heuristics, biases and other departures from rational decision-making models and assumptions and shows how the framework - story - provided by Kahneman's 'two systems' account of the mind is able to provide a meta-explanation (to a certain extent) of those interesting observations and findings. Second, its treatment of prospect theory, which I hadn't previously grappled with properly, and again in a wider context that helps to make sense of familiar elements like loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity to gains and losses, and endowment and other related effects. Third, the distinction between the experiencing and the remembering selves and hints of what this might mean in seeking to design societies that maximise their members' wellbeing. And fourth, the sheer conceptual richness of the whole, in bringing together all of these ideas and coining some new ones (WYSIATI). A book, I imagine, that I'll return to in future, for particular sections or in full - and with interest to see what else it leads to.
