A scene from the London Marathon
featured image by Julian Mason/Flickr CC BY 2.0

Thinking fast and wrong

Thinking fast, contrary to what we are sometimes led to believe, is a largely adaptive trait that serves us well. When it is not, and leads us up the garden path, it confronts us, not so much with the fact that we have biases, but that we are lazy thinkers, forced to eat some intellectual humble pie.

Koen Smets
7 min readApr 26, 2024

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They say parents live vicariously through their children. Well, last Sunday, my distant (and, frankly, always unrealistic) dream of running the London Marathon was going to be realized by my daughter. She had been entered in the ballot for a place by her husband, and as one of the 20,000 lucky ones (out of 500,000 people applying), she was given a starting time of 11am, at one of the 4 starting locations (the logistics of handling a record 53,000 runners is quite something.) And thanks to modern technology, we would be able to track her both via her own sports watch, and through the official Marathon app.

The app seemed to have some trouble showing her details, but thankfully, the email with the link to her watch data came through and we could see her start off. That is to say, the link we received was actually for her husband’s device. Why might that be?

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Koen Smets
Koen Smets

Written by Koen Smets

Accidental behavioural economist in search of wisdom using insights from (behavioural) economics in organization development. On Twitter/Bluesky as @koenfucius