Daniel Kahneman: A Gateway to His Life, Ideas, and Legacy

"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."One evening in occupied Paris, a small boy turned his brown sweater inside out to hide the yellow star and set off home down an empty street. A soldier in the black uniform of the SS beckoned him over, picked him up and hugged him - the boy rigid with fear that the man would feel the star through the wool. The soldier spoke to him with great emotion, opened his wallet, showed him a photograph of a boy of his own, gave him some money, and let him go.Daniel Kahneman was still telling that story sixty years later. He drew from it the sentence that could stand over his whole career: that people are endlessly complicated and interesting.There is a difficulty with it. The yellow star did not become compulsory in occupied France until June 1942 - months after the latest evening his own dating allows. Nothing that happened to him is in question. What has moved is the scenery, in the memory of the man who spent fifty years demonstrating that the self who remembers an episode is not the self who lived it, and is sometimes wrong.That gap is the book.[...the army interview system at twenty-one, the Tversky partnership, the Nobel Amos didn't live to share, then the "Inside: " list - the eulogy, the cold-water experiment, survival-versus-mortality framing, automatic enrolment, the train-wreck letter, the chapter of his own bestseller that didn't survive, the PNAS retraction, the 2023 self-overturning, the ending he chose.]Most books about Kahneman explain the biases. This one follows the corrections.