How to Maximize Happiness

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If you miss a flight due to a traffic jam outside your control, would you rather be two hours late or just one minute late? Memory has a disproportionate weight because it's with us, stays with us. It's the only thing we get to keep. People want to maximize their overall sense of how their life is gone and that hasn't been done.

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You might be surprised by what occupies Daniel Kahneman’s thoughts. “You seem to think that I think of bias all the time,” he tells Tyler. “I really don’t think of bias that much.” These days, noise might be the concept most on Kahneman’s mind. A forthcoming book, coauthored with Cass Sunstein and “a brilliant Frenchman you haven’t heard of” is about how random variability affects our decision-making. And while we’ve spent a lot of time studying how bias causes error in judgment, Kahneman says, we aren’t thinking nearly enough about the problem of noise.

In November, Kahneman joined Tyler for a live conversation about bias, noise and more, including happiness, memory, the replication crisis in psychology, advice to CEOs about improving decision-making, superforecasters, the influence of Freud, working in a second language, the value of intuition, and why he can’t help you win arguments with a spouse.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded November 12th, 2018 Other ways to connect

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