The World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is certainly better known for the business and policy leaders it gathers. But I enjoyed some sessions by luminaries from the worlds of science and technology today as well. Now that I'm back, I thought I'd write up a couple, starting with the first session I saw."It's a bit intimidating but I'll have to overcome that," said the first speaker at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman got a warm laughs in response from his "intimidating" audience as his talk got underway on "Thinking Fast and Slow" (Kahneman's book of the same name is excerpted here ). Kahneman said readers can see his book as the tale of two metaphorical characters at work in the brain, System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the closest to what we call memory, and includes our intelligence, knowledge of the world and skills. It is System 1 that instantly knows 2+2=4 without a moment to think about it. System 2, in contrast, is the effortful system. "If I say 17x24, and if you make the mistake of doing the calculation," said Kahneman to appreciative chuckles, you will go through a series of steps. That's System 2. [More]














Source: Davos: Decisions and Data