Thinking, Fast and Slow by Prof Daniel Kahneman

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know. Most of the time, trying to judge the validity of our own judgements is not worth doing ... I am not a great believer in self-help.

From: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, 77, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University. Kahneman was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in psychology which "challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making". Someone one might say knows a little about the workings of the soul. In this book, he analyses the strengths and weaknesses of what makes leaders, including how poor they are all at making predictions (they all are but it does not matter because people quickly forget). In this book, he lays out his theories and attempts to educate us about how we see and think about life.

I'd love a good psychologist to have a look at hugely overoptimistic and insane grandiose Lekhraj Kirpalani (bearing in mind that from approximately 1932 to 1950 he thought he was God, the author of the Gita and responsible for bringing on WWII and the End of the World ... which he often predicted but never got right).

It is probably forgotten from BK history by now but in the early days, Lekhraj Kirpalani's family did think he had gone mad and sent him away from his home. For me, all the original Brahma Kumaris did was institutionalise that insanity and impregnate others with it. For me, that is part of the BK "honeymoon experience" and the Brahma Kumaris' will to separate us from non-BKs is to encourage us to weaken and ignore our logical 'System 2' mind and surrender to them.

Reviews taken from a number of sources.

The mind has two systems that drive the way we think.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional
System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical

System 1 simplifies, confirms, looks for, and believes it sees, narrative coherence in an often random world. It does not perform complicated feats of logic or statistical evaluations.

System 2 is our conscious, thinking mind. We conceive of this active consciousness as the principal actor, the “decider” in our lives. System 2 thinks slowly, it considers, evaluates, reasons. Its work requires mental effort.

Kahneman advises that we "recognize the signs that we are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2" ... or ask others.

Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities - and also the faults and biases - of fast thinking [which we call intuition], and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior