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When I'm hungry I tend to make myself bigger servings of meals than I can comfortably eat, and I always want to buy more food and snacks in the supermarket than I need. We could call this a bias, I suppose. Some primal part of my mind gets bathed in hunger hormones and such, and it makes me do things I shouldn't be doing, and those things would make me fat, so I learned to control this hellish urge, and whenever I do the groceries hungry, I remind myself of this fact. Whenever I start a meal really hungry I pick less food than what my eyes desire, and even gulp down a glass of water in order to ease my sense of hunger a bit.

Why do I tell you this?

Because some reviewers have said that it's useless to read about our mental short circuits, because we can't possibly do anything about them.

Wrong. We can!

Identifying your biases and intellectual pitfalls is the first step to combating them.

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow talks about much more nuanced, and much less obvious circuits of thinking, and boy, it talks about a lot of them. I fancy myself a skeptic, a scientist, a student of thinking, so I've already known about most of the topics this book touches, and while it is not a complete list of all our intellectual quirks, IT TOOK ME YEARS to learn about the ones found in the book. So dear potential reader, you are lucky, because thanks to this wonderful book, you get to learn about them in the space of a lazy weekend (499 pages).

Whether you are a big time corporate fatcat, a teacher, or a soccer mom, you'll benefit greatly from keeping at least some of Kahneman's conclusions in mind, because you are human, and we humans need to learn how to think, because we tend to make all sorts of mistakes.