Friday November 11, 2011

Nov 11, 2011

<p>If you want to know why no one predicted the Arab spring or the financial meltdown, Kahneman has a simple, but distressing answer – it’s because we never really had the ability to make a truly analytical assessment; our System One and System Two prevented that from ever happening.</p> <p>To the facts, we add things like, for example, a “halo” effect, in which we give a seemingly successful leader the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong, because he once was so right. Our desire for a good narrative leads us to omit the power of luck; Kahneman notes that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were willing to sell Google (GOOG) for less than $1 million a year after its founding, but the buyer said the price was too high – certainly a lucky thing rather than a brilliant thing. Yet everything Google’s execs do today is likely to be seen within the rubric of brilliant businessmen.</p> — Jennifer Reingold, Fortune, <a href="http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/11/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahneman/?section=magazines_fortune" target="_blank">http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/11/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahneman/?section=magazines_fortune</a>