Latest news with #DanielKahneman
The Sun
7 days ago
- General
- The Sun
Lessons from sophomore philosophy class
I took a sophomore philosophy course in formal logic from a professor who was an enthusiastic admirer of Socrates, as all are. He did not give many formal lectures. We could read the assigned texts just as well and at a time or place of our choosing, as was his excuse. As such, his class was lively with discussions and rebuttals as well as questions and answers. One of his early exercises was to pretend that we were facing a real-life decision. Should I buy a new car or fix the present one? Or not buy one at all and depend on public transit. Another was whether I should go on to graduate school or find a job; marry now or wait. He would then have us record our decision immediately, for or against, impulsively as it were. Decades later, Daniel Kahneman would call that 'fast thinking' in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Following that, our professor would begin the discussion and then make us list the pros and cons for each point. We would then give a numerical weightage to each statement for its importance to us. At the end, we would total the positives and negatives and then compare whether our 'fast thinking' decision made in earlier pre-analysis matched that of our deliberate post-analysis 'slow thinking.' That was his class exercise in rational decision-making, and also the one lesson I found useful and relevant throughout my life. As my dilemma was novel for the class (should I remain in Canada for graduate work or return to Malaysia?), it was discussed extensively as an example of serious decision-making. For added measure, it morphed into a discussion on community obligations versus personal aspirations, where the two would parallel and when they would be at odds, with our professor guiding and prodding us, Socrates-like. We (especially me) were surprised at how different our decisions were before and after that careful methodical analysis. That was also the first time I had entertained the thought of not returning home immediately but to stay back and continue my studies and gain valuable experience. I wanted to return as a seasoned surgeon, not a half-baked one. Looking back at that class exercise and after using that technique many times since, it is not so much the decisions that I have made over the years, rather the process that I have forced myself to engage in, that is, deliberate downstream analysis instead of a rushed decision swayed by impulses and emotions of the moment. Kahneman elaborated that in his Thinking, Fast and Slow. He remains the rare non-economist to have won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his insights on decision-making. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in the discipline, humans are not the rational Homo economicus we are made out to be, obsessed only with seeking 'maximal utility.' Emotions and other extraneous factors do come into play, often in major roles, with our decisions. Socrates echoed something similar two millennia ago: know thyself! Or more famously quoted, an unexamined life is not worth living, reflecting the importance of critical self-reflection. As a physician and a Muslim, I disagree. All lives, being Allah's precious gift, are worth living, examined or not. My late father used a comparable technique to make us 'think slow.' Before leaving the house for a trip, he would pause and ask, 'Are we all ready?' If we were to answer with a quick perfunctory 'yes', he would be more specific as to whether the back door of the house had been locked and had we left enough water for the cat. The very act of pausing, or slowing our thinking through asking those questions, forces us to mentally recheck things. It is amazing how often we had forgotten to lock the door or switch off a light. Pausing and thinking, otherwise known as deliberating, would trigger many questions: the hows, whys, whats and whens, and most important, the 'what ifs' and the 'are you sure?' queries. Just by posing those simple questions we are already well on the way of exercising critical thinking and arriving at a more satisfactory as well as a successful solution to our problem, if not a more informed decision. That is also how a child learns, by asking endless 'whys.' That can be exasperating to parents but in the end that sharpens and enhances the child's learning. The lessons I learned from my old philosophy class decades ago are still relevant to me now that I am entering my eighth decade of life. That is, be a child again, and often. Be curious. Keep asking why!
Globe and Mail
15-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
When stock markets turn ugly, these four tricks will help prevent knee-jerk reactions
On April 4, the S&P/TSX Composite Index fell almost 5 per cent. While some investors hammered the sell button, others went on with their day and made no changes to their portfolios. Same red numbers, two opposite reactions. Why? Behavioural science says big losses should, in theory, jolt us out of knee-jerk habits and push us into careful 'System 2 thinking' – a term psychologist Daniel Kahneman used to describe our deliberate reasoning, analytical mode. 'System 1' is its opposite: fast, automatic, fuelled by emotion and mental shortcuts. System 2 is reflective, methodical, the part that double-checks math homework and rereads contracts. The trick is getting the brain to shift gears from the first to the second when markets turn ugly. New research published in the Judgment and Decision Making journal offers a clue. Experiments found that financial losses prompt people to spend more time thinking and to make better, more deliberative decisions – but only when there is enough time and cognitive space to think. Add a tight deadline, or the perception of a time pressure, and the benefit disappears: participants flip back to snap (System 1) judgments. The authors paid volunteers to solve brain-teaser questions. Get one right, earn 25 cents in one series of questions. Get it wrong, lose 25 cents in another series. When a potential loss was on the line, subjects spent more time thinking and arrived at more correct answers. That's evidence that the sting of loss can summon System 2. Opinion: If you lose money in the stock market, do you double down? That's called a martingale strategy, and it's dangerous Then the experimenters imposed a 20-second countdown clock. Under the gun, performance tanked and participants defaulted to the fast, intuitive – and often wrong – answer. Losses can prompt deep thinking or blind panic. What decides the outcome is whether the brain is given breathing room. Now bring that insight to Bay Street. Markets embed their own stopwatch: price quotes refresh almost instantly and social feeds stir up emotions around the clock. Investors do not merely sense urgency: both mainstream and social media revolve around it. Worse, the clock never stops. Extended-hours trading sessions for Canadian investors are already available from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET for many stocks, and overnight trading (8 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET the next morning) effectively makes stock trading available around the clock. Given that cryptoasset trading has no market close, maybe the move to around-the-clock security trading is inevitable. But while retail platforms tout overnight access as empowerment, the side effect is obvious: we have lost the natural curfew the closing bell once provided. Instead of cooling off overnight, a jittery investor can unload shares at 3 a.m., when liquidity might be thin and fear might be thick. Opinion: The Big Six banks are to blame for the lifeless Toronto Stock Exchange In contrast, regulators and exchanges recognize the need for oxygen. Market 'circuit breakers' halt stock market trading after big losses occur in a single trading session. These engineered breathing spaces give market participants time to digest what is happening. The implication for investors is obvious: while market losses can jolt us into deeper, more careful reasoning, this benefit is only realized if we have the time and mental space to reflect. In fast-moving markets, or when pressured to make quick decisions, the advantage of loss-induced deliberation may be lost so we need to figure out how to buy time or avoid reflexive decision-making. Here are four practical defence strategies that could help: 1. Write an investment policy statement before you need it. Even a one-page policy, drafted when you are calm, acts as a lighthouse when seas get rough. 2. Automate what you can. Prescheduled contributions and auto-rebalancing reduce decision points. 3. Use a checklist buddy. Talk decisions through with an adviser or trusted friend. Saying it out loud acts as a speed bump against emotion. 4. Respect the bell (even if markets ignore it). For investors that day-trade, decide in advance that you will not place trades outside regular hours unless a preset rule demands it. Sleep, like diversification, can be free risk management. I'm probably guilty of banging the drum on this but investors should remember that platforms hungry for order flow wave the 'democratization is good for all investors' flag proudly. But more access is not synonymous with better outcomes. Investors need to keep their eyes open. When markets nosedive, the colour red is not the true enemy – the alarmism and perceived time crunch is. Give your brain a little oxygen or adopt systems to avoid reflexive responses and the same loss that might have provoked a panicked sale might be avoided. Sometimes the smartest trade is no trade at all and the best circuit breakers may be the ones you install for yourself. Preet Banerjee is a consultant to the wealth management industry with a focus on commercial applications of behavioural finance research.
Forbes
05-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Leadership Doesn't Stop With The C-Suite. So Why Should Learning?
Leaders often talk a lot about adaptability, but when it comes to their own development, too many treat learning as something they outgrow. It's one of the great ironies of corporate life: the higher someone climbs, the less likely they are to be formally supported in thinking critically, creatively or ethically. That's not just short-sighted—it's risky. The most senior people in firms hold decision rights over the biggest levers: strategic priorities, organizational culture, financial bets, technology adoption, workforce policies. When their thinking is stale or reactive, the consequences echo far beyond the boardroom. Thinking well isn't just a nice-to-have. It's the core of modern leadership. Yet support for lifelong learning, especially for those in or approaching senior roles, is quietly being rolled back on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of what's celebrated in business—speed, decisiveness, hustle—comes from what psychologists call System 1 thinking. It's fast, intuitive and efficient. But when complexity enters the picture, instinct isn't enough. The messy, high-stakes challenges that now define leadership—climate change, geopolitical tension, workforce transformation, AI ethics—can't be solved on autopilot. 'Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats,' wrote Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. We can do it, but we'd rather not. Deep, reflective thought is cognitively expensive. Most of us avoid it. That's a problem when leaders are tasked with navigating uncertainty, interpreting ambiguous data and making decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of lives. And AI tools don't help as much as we think. Generative AI may streamline tasks, but it also discourages hard thinking. It tempts leaders to delegate judgment to algorithms trained on the same public data everyone else is using. That leads to intellectual convergence, not creativity. There's something seductively efficient about outsourcing reflection. When tools generate plausible answers before leaders even finish formulating their questions, the temptation to skip the hard part—wrestling with ambiguity, weighing nuance, facing doubt—becomes stronger. Over time, that changes not just how leaders work, but how they think. Or whether they think at all. The danger isn't that AI gives us bad answers. It's that it gives us good enough ones—answers that sound right, feel familiar, and allow us to move on. But good leadership isn't about sounding right. It's about being right, at the right time, for the right reasons. And sometimes that means slowing down long enough to be uncomfortable. The World Economic Forum lists analytical and creative thinking as the top skills needed in the global workforce—not just now, but five years from now. Yet in many leadership pipelines, those skills are underdeveloped and under-supported. In the UK, government policy has just taken a notable turn. Starting in 2026, public funding for Level 7 Senior Leader Apprenticeships—postgraduate programs that combine applied strategy, ethics and organizational development—will be restricted to learners aged 21 and under. Employers who previously relied on the Apprenticeship Levy to fund these programs for mid-career or senior managers will now have to self-fund or stop offering them. Anne Dibley, the head of Post-Experience and Apprenticeship Programmes at Henley Business School, notes that employers are already expressing concern. 'They've seen the transformative impact of Level 7 training,' she told me in an interview. 'It's enabled their managers to challenge assumptions, navigate complexity, and make more considered decisions.' Dibley emphasized that creating space for managers to explore the value of curiosity—through questioning, reflection, and openness—stimulates the critical and creative thinking that organizations urgently need in an increasingly uncertain world. Dibley also highlighted a broader concern: while there is widespread enthusiasm for investing in early-career talent, withdrawing funding from leadership development sends the wrong signal. 'Organisations will still need to develop their leaders,' she said. 'But now they'll have to do it without support. Some will rise to that challenge—others won't.' The issue isn't just one of policy design. It's about the deeper message being conveyed: that leadership learning beyond a certain career stage is optional—or worse, dispensable. The UK's rollback of funding comes at the same time the U.S. is witnessing its own tensions over adult education and institutional autonomy. In late May, a federal judge temporarily blocked an effort by the Trump administration to strip Harvard University of its ability to host international students. The Department of Homeland Security had previously revoked Harvard's certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, triggering a lawsuit from the university. While the legal case centers on immigration procedures and alleged free speech violations, its broader implications are clear. At stake is the question of whether universities—and by extension, professionals—retain the right to learn, teach and exchange ideas free from government interference. Even a temporary restriction sends a chilling signal. It suggests that advanced learning, especially learning perceived to challenge prevailing political narratives, can be disincentivised or disrupted. And it risks reducing access to the very kind of thinking that strong leadership requires. Leadership education doesn't have to be theoretical. The best programs aren't about lectures or certificates. They're built on real organizational challenges. Participants tackle live projects, engage stakeholders, gather data, test ideas and reflect on the results. They don't just learn how to lead—they lead while learning. This kind of experiential approach, rooted in action learning principles, allows leaders to develop critical thinking skills in the context of actual work. It fosters the ability to ask better questions, to see beyond one's own assumptions and to hold complexity without retreating into binary choices. It also builds judgment—a quality often confused with experience. Experience alone doesn't generate insight. Reflection does. And reflection needs space, structure and support. There's a tendency in both business and policy to treat leadership as a fixed trait—something people have or don't. That mindset is convenient, but wrong. Leadership is a practice. And like any practice, it deteriorates without deliberate effort. Organizations that fail to support leadership learning beyond the early years of a career end up promoting people into roles they're not cognitively or ethically prepared for. The consequences can be subtle at first: missed signals, narrow thinking, fragile strategies. But they accumulate fast. The solution isn't to overdesign or overcontrol learning. It's to make space for it. To treat thinking not as indulgence but as necessity. And to recognise that good leadership, like good judgment, is something we get better at only if we keep working on it. Public funding changes and political attacks may make it harder. But smart firms won't wait to be told. They'll invest in learning not because it's mandated, but because it's mission-critical. Because once thinking stops, leadership does too. And when that happens, decisions don't get worse all at once. They just get narrower. Fewer voices are heard. Fewer options are considered. The easy answers get louder, and the better questions fade. Until one day, someone asks, 'How did we miss this?' And no one in the room can remember how to think it through.
Forbes
30-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Your Mind Can Create Using The Same Process As AI
Woman sketching a business plan on a placard at a creative office Four short months ago, when China launched DeepSeek, its new AI chatbot, the effect on the U.S. stock market was profound. Hardest hit was NVIDIA Corporation, the leading supplier of hardware and software for DeepSeek's entrenched American competitors— OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, and Anthropic's Claude. NVIDIA lost almost $600 billion in market capitalization and its share price plummeted 17%. As this Forbes article reports, DeepSeek also started a price war among its Chinese AI competitors: ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. What shook up all these constituencies was DeepSeek's revolutionary AI architecture with a secret sauce called Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) a vast simplification from the single giant neural network called Large Language Model (LLM) used by ChatGPT, Llama, and Claude. Both MoE and LLM provide users with the ability to manage access to a huge corpus of digital information. But your mind is capable of doing the same with a huge corpus of human information. With or without AI, whenever you set about to generate, organize, and create information—whether as text or spoken—you must access a huge corpus of information in your brain. So in the spirt of National Creativity Day, this blog will provide you with a very simple four-step process to do that—and to become more effective when you create. Fundamental to all the steps is an understanding of the basic concepts in Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow in which he explains that the human mind functions in two distinct phases. If you start to develop your presentation, report, or email with Slow Thinking factors such as logic, sequence, and word choice (or, for that matter, the color, style, font, and design of your slides) while your Fast Thinking is bubbling up all those random ideas, the whole process descends into disarray. The key then is to allow the Fast Thinking to run its course before attempting to impose a sequence with Slow Thinking. So, control your Fast Thinking with these four steps: Now and only now are you ready to organize and sequence your content. Who needs DeepSeek?
Time of India
29-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
6 essential books every professional should read to decode human behaviour and communicate smarter
In today's fast-paced, high-stakes professional environment, understanding human behaviour is more than a soft skill, it's a strategic asset. Whether you're managing teams, negotiating deals, leading change, or building client relationships, the ability to decode why people act the way they do is key to effective communication and sustained influence. While countless theories have emerged over time, a handful of books stand out for their clarity, depth, and real-world application. The six acclaimed titles listed here offer powerful frameworks to help professionals manage complex interpersonal dynamics with greater insight and effectiveness. Whether your goal is to influence ethically, make sounder decisions, or lead with empathy, these books serve as indispensable guides. 1. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini Robert Cialdini's Influence introduces six universal principles that drive human decision-making: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. These principles help explain how marketers, leaders, and even cults can shape behaviour. Professionals will learn how to apply these tactics responsibly, while also recognising and defending against unethical persuasion. This book is especially valuable for those in marketing, negotiations, and stakeholder engagement. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Esta nueva alarma con cámara es casi regalada en Lo Prado (ver precio) Verisure Alarmas Leer más Undo 2. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explores two core modes of thinking in this groundbreaking work: fast, intuitive decision-making and slow, analytical reasoning. Through compelling insights into biases such as confirmation bias and loss aversion, Kahneman helps readers understand how judgment is often flawed, and how to correct it. A must-read for executives, analysts, and decision-makers seeking to improve cognitive clarity and strategic thinking. 3. The Laws of Human Nature – Robert Greene Drawing from psychology, history, and philosophy, Robert Greene examines why people frequently act irrationally and how to respond with emotional intelligence. The Laws of Human Nature offers tools to identify manipulation, manage egos, and convert adversaries into allies. This book is highly relevant for leaders, consultants, and professionals navigating high-stakes or politically sensitive environments. 4. Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely Behavioural economist Dan Ariely reveals the underlying logic behind seemingly irrational behaviour in areas such as productivity, spending, and decision-making. Predictably Irrational shows how human actions, though often flawed, follow consistent, predictable patterns. Entrepreneurs, economists, product managers, and policy professionals will find valuable, research-driven insights into how people truly think and behave. 5. How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie Dale Carnegie's enduring bestseller remains one of the most influential works on relationship-building. With practical techniques like using people's names, showing genuine interest, and listening actively, How to Win Friends and Influence People helps readers foster trust and rapport, both vital for effective leadership and team dynamics. This book is essential for managers, client-facing professionals, and anyone seeking to strengthen workplace communication. 6. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking – Susan Cain Susan Cain's Quiet challenges the extrovert-centric model of leadership by showcasing the unique strengths introverts bring to organisations. From thoughtful problem-solving to deep focus and creativity, Cain reveals why introverts are key to building balanced, high-performing teams. This book is particularly insightful for team leaders, HR professionals, and introverted professionals looking to leverage their natural strengths. Why These Books Matter Human behaviour is complex, but understanding its drivers is essential for professional success. These six titles offer research-backed, actionable guidance for improving communication, decision-making, leadership, and interpersonal effectiveness. Whether you're leading a team, presenting to stakeholders, or managing client expectations, the insights in these books provide a foundation for stronger performance and more meaningful professional relationships. All six books are readily available through major bookstores and online retailers—making it easier than ever to access powerful tools to better understand and navigate human behaviour in today's evolving workplace. Ready to empower your child for the AI era? Join our program now! Hurry, only a few seats left.
