Bill and I have been having this friendly debate for a number of years now. I believe the insights of Tversky and Kahneman are fully deserving of every accolade they receive, but they don’t answer all the questions. Personally, I think describing a lawyer as a having an excellent Kahnemanian “Slow Brain” is like describing a baseball pitcher as having a 102 mph fastball – it’s a necessary but not sufficient ingredient of excellence (you need control as well as velocity).
As I’ve argued at length, it’s because pure analytical ability (the “slow brain” quality) fails to capture the subjective and bottomless experience of judgment – in short, as Kahneman acknowledges, sometimes your fast brain answer is the right one, so if you use your slow brain to decide whether the fast brain or slow brain is giving you the correct judgment, are you making a mistake?
