‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ Chapter Summaries / Notes [link]
I recently read Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ (actually listened to the audiobook) and I wanted to find a summary of the experiments he describes and I stumbled upon this: http://sivers.org/book/ThinkingFastAndSlow. It has a summary of the interesting/important points of each chapter. Most of the statements seem to be direct quotes from the book, so if you have it in an electronic format (it can easily be obtained from uh, various sources) you can search for those quotes and find the context.
Bonus: Notes from Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and also many other books.
Nice one. This actually reminds me of Tim Ferriss’ method of reading nonfiction: always keep a notepad to hand, just like you’re in class. This strikes me as worth trying.
I am currently reading Kahneman’s book, and about 100 pages in I realized I was going to cache a lot more of the information if I started mapping out some of the dependencies between ideas in a directed graph. Example: I’ve got an edge from {Substitution} to {Affect heuristic}, labeled with the reminder “How do I feel about it? vs. What do I think about it?”. My goal is not to write down everything I want to remember, rather to (1) provide just enough to jog my memory when I consult this graph in the future, and (2) force me to think critically about what I’m reading when deciding whether or not add more nodes and edges.
Is that how other people take notes? It seems really inefficient.
I always skip the punctuation, articles, and anything else that doesn’t get to the point. Then group sentences into pseudo-paragraphs by topic, each on its own line, with indents for nested clauses / intermediate steps / contextual notes. This is how I would summarize the first page from of the linked notes: http://pastebin.com/fCSpjm2R
Once you’ve done that, you open your notes in a week or so to see whether you wrote anything in a way which was only clear at the time (“Hedgehogs “know one big thing” and have a theory about the world”, but they didn’t define hedgehogs as the type of predictor Tetlock identified) and to try rearranging all of the points into high level perspective (There’s no obvious logical progression in the sequence of “intuition, attention, mood, doubting, …”).
Prose and conversational style are for the end product of write ups / presentations / explanations to strangers on the subway, not for integrating / restructuring knowledge.