Developing Fast, Thinking Slow

How Daniel Kahneman Changed Software Development (for me at least)

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
9 min readApr 23, 2024
Photo by Juan Rumimpunu on Unsplash

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better. Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Charlie Munger helped me understand humans don’t act rationally and logically. Understanding this can help you understand the craziness of software development.

People believe they are rational but most people are acting on instinct, bias or are emotionally driven. It was Kahneman and Tversky whose studies proved humans don’t decide rationally.

When people decide they could make errors of judgement bias, fallacies and shortcuts the brain uses to survive the physical world.

You can’t stop the brain sabotaging decisions, but you can stop and think about it the decisions and override those decisions with rational logic.

Kahneman says the mind has 2 systems

  • System 1 — works…

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Ben "The Hosk" Hosking

Technology philosopher | Software dev → Solution architect | Avid reader | Life long learner