Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024)
Filed under the name Daniel · September 30, 2026
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize studying how people actually make decisions, which is not something I ever expected to have opinions about, but 34 years on a mill floor and in union negotiations taught me plenty about how people really decide things, versus how they claim to decide them, and reading about his work, some of it lines up with what I saw firsthand. His book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' apparently reshaped how economists and scientists understand judgment and choice, showing that people aren't the perfectly rational calculators a lot of theory assumed we were. I could've told you that for free after sitting through enough contract votes. What I respect is that he did the actual careful research to prove it rather than just having a hunch about human nature, which is the difference between an opinion and a Nobel Prize. Sometimes the smartest finding is just confirming, rigorously, what regular working people already knew from experience.