u/logielle

Daniel Kahneman's infamous Thinking, Fast and Slow is often recommended to people seeking to learn more about or improve critical thinking skills. This book challenges ideas regarding how confident we should be in human judgement. It famously introduced a broad audience to processes that have implications for critical thinking and decision-making, such as cognitive biases and heuristics.

However, a notable portion of the decades of research that it summarizes to that end have been widely criticized for relying on non-reproducible studies in light of the replication crisis. Kahneman himself responded to some of the criticism regarding such shortcomings, acknowledging "I placed too much faith in underpowered studies" regarding a particular concept in the 4th chapter of the book.

This leaves one with the question of, if at all, how to read this book, which concepts to take seriously and which to disregard, and what such selection would mean for the broader picture that the book paints.

I found one resource by an educator named Stephanie Simoes which seems to address this question directly. She's behind Critikid, an educational platform for critical thinking and media literacy for children and teens. Instead of uncritically accepting every bit of research cited in the book, or uncritically rejecting it completely, she suggests, "Thinking, Fast and Slow remains a valuable book on human judgment, but it should be read with caution".

It doesn't seem to go over every single study cited in the book, nor does it seem limited to only evaluating which studies are robust and which less so. It mainly evaluates the studies used for the key concepts of the book, and what such evaluation taken together would mean for how the concept should be approached, which aspects of it to give weight to and what seems compromised, et cetera.

Specifically, the resource is A Modern Guide to Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I found it rather helpful in my re-read of the book, hence I decided to share.