Hobbes in 1651 nailed how Bloom, Coyne, and Kahneman differ: “Reason is not...born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is; but attained by industry.” Basic experience teaches everybody how to slake a thirst. Basic experience ensures, to quote Isaac Chotiner, that we live “according to...reason 99% of the time.” But Kahneman works mainly on numerical decisions. Since “humans didn't evolve to think about numbers,” that sort of rationality requires training (industry). Coyne’s observation that we are mostly rational, with a “dollop of irrationality,” is an advance on Freud’s un-falsifiable fictions. But Kahneman’s cognitive-bias patterns beat that dollop and should finally rid us of Freud’s demons. However Kahnemen’s work also has demons. Cognitive biases have two sources of error, the observed behavior and the “rational” goal, but economists use “rational” differently. Their methods, and inputs, and goals can sometimes be mad. - bigthink.com