1
" Characteristics of System 1:
• generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions
• operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control
• can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search)
• executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training
• creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory
• links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
• distinguishes the surprising from the normal
• infers and invents causes and intentions
• neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt
• is biased to believe and confirm
• exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)
• focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)
• generates a limited set of basic assessments
• represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate
• matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness)
• computes more than intended (mental shotgun)
• sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)
• is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)*
• overweights low probabilities*
• shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)*
• responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)*
• frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another* "
― Daniel Kahneman , Thinking, Fast and Slow
2
" The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer. "
― Paul R. Halmos
