My Random Rants

This is an interview with Samit Basu,  one of my favorite authors. I have a feeling that had he been British or American with a snazzy bestseller name he would have won a closet full of awards by now. I have enjoyed reading his work immensely and his debut, the Gameworld trilogy(as I have made clear here ) has the effect of sticking to my hands whenever I pick it up and leaving only when its done . Heck I even enjoy reading his 140 character tweets . His last two novels Terror on the Titanic and Turbulence are great rides, written with a verve and panache that few authors match. He has also written short stories(One of which was in an anthology of erotic fiction) and comics. All in all he is just a fantastic talent and US and UK readers should get a taste of his work soon when Turbulence is published there. You wrote this trilogy called the Gameworld trilogy(which was absolutely gobsmackingly brilliant and fantastic by the way). Any plans on doing another trilogy soon.

Thinking fast and slow is the culmination of the decades of research of Daniel Kahneman and his  posthumous colleague Amos Tversky. (For the ones who give weight to awards Kahneman is a Psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, a strange quirk) Daniel Kahneman talks about how minds are divided into two systems System 1 and System 2. System 1 is our intuition, the fast one, the quick and the default decision maker. System 2 is the rational one, the one that does the hard thinking. Kahneman of course makes the point that System1 and System2 are convenient abstractions and are only models that make it much easier to think about how the the mind works. The best way to describe the book would be say that it resembles Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, only its a lot more rigorous. He talks about several human fallacies and how man is in fact not rational but can be manipulated. He talks about experts in which fields are really experts. He points out that to truly become an expert