Today, I was thinking about Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. I think of this book at least several times each week. It’s got to be one of the most important books I have ever read, in that it identifies numerous ways in which people are unwittingly mislead by mental heuristics, i.e., by their intuitions and shortcuts. You might be a bigger threat to yourself than any outsider.

The solution to Kahneman’s heuristics is seemingly that we should be more careful or that we should train ourselves so that we are not mislead by these heuristics. Kahneman concludes, unfortunately, that heuristics are too strong to recognize in real time. He characterizes them to be like optical illusions. When we look at them over and over we will be fooled over and over.

Here is one of my favorite optical illusions: The Ames Window. My mind is intransigent. I can’t unsee this illusion even though I know exactly what is going on.

Many (e.g., I’ve heard interviews by Sam Harris and Shane Parrish) have suggested to Kahneman that since we know about these systematic ways in which the mind runs off the rails, we can make adjustments. Kahneman will have none of it. ““The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”  Kahneman writes further: “Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”

Or consider that Kahneman and Richard Nisbett seem to disagree on whether we can train out our systematic mistakes, yet this article (“The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your BrainScience suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?”) suggests that we seem to be more easily trainable with regard to “easy problems.”

This is nonetheless, discouraging, right?  Maybe that’s why it is a good idea to work with groups of people.  Maybe someone else will catch your mistakes.  And if not, maybe you can catch your mistakes in a post-mortem and then add your mistakes on your check list to help you for the next time the situation arises.