I recently read Kahneman's 2011 book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" -- it should probably be required reading for everybody who's in charge of making decisions that affect a lot of people.
I have to second this advice, even though I'm halfway through it.
Kahneman has spent decades investigating biases and cognitive error. And it turns out he's not all that bad at popularising his and related research.
Of particular fascination (and frustration!) are the little examples he liberally sprinkles throughout the book. Small quizzes, questions and the like for the reader to try. Try as I might, I have consistently "failed" these in the way Kahneman goes on to explain.
He even explains why he does that: because it's hard to particularise from the general. It's easy to generalise from the particular.
I've found that many dimly held intuitions I've developed over the years about "how the world works" are starkly illustrated in the book. And many things I believed were not borne out be research.
Bottom line: it's a great book and very illuminating. Read it.
I'm halfway through it as well, but have a less positive impression. I came into it with a lot of respect for Kahneman and his research, but the first half of book is extremely flat. Much like the reaction here to this Vanity Fair teaser, I constantly find myself quibbling with the examples, and disagreeing with the explanations.
I'm not sure who to blame, though. I think the book was written over a considerable period of time. Perhaps Kahneman's standards have changed? Perhaps there were multiple editors involved, some of whom (like the Vanity Fair author) didn't really understand the material? Or perhaps the editor was great, but only worked on some of the chapters.
I'd offer a much less enthusiastic bottom line: It's a frustrating book, but you should read it anyway. Skip to Chapter 20 "The Illusion of Validity" if you get bogged down.
I agree that the writing style is flat, but it's also very thorough and methodical. More than once I've found myself thinking "but what about X?" and then there, on the very next page, he addresses X to a depth I'd never considered.
The biggest counterargument against his tests is that like a lot of sentences, they can be read in more than one way. Possibly for people with System 2 minds that like to dissect concepts, that's enormously annoying.
