[HN Gopher] Thinking fast, slow, and not at all: System 3 jumps ...
___________________________________________________________________
Thinking fast, slow, and not at all: System 3 jumps the shark
Author : martingoodson
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-05-24 06:15 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| leephillips wrote:
| This is just embarrassing. The claim in the book about an absence
| of correlation implying an absence of causation is correct. The
| car thing is not a counterexample, simply because pushing on the
| gas pedal does not cause the speed to increase, obviously. For
| example, the car might be switched off. There is confusion about
| the concept of cause here.
|
| Further embarrassment arises when the author talks about the lead
| book author's credentials. Does he not even know who Kahneman is?
| It's bad and irrelevant enough to dwell on what you think are an
| author's qualifications, but at least find out something about
| him first.
| belter wrote:
| You mean the same Kahneman who got:
|
| - A Nobel Prize in Economics. - Whose book has almost 20,000
| reviews with an average of almost 5 stars. - Whose book was
| winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in
| 2012
|
| and then ...
|
| got most of the findings undermined by this blog analysis:
|
| "Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off
| the Rails"
| https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
|
| and then...
|
| commented as himself in the same blog
| https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
|
| stating and I quote : "I accept the basic conclusions of this
| blog..."
|
| You mean that one ?
|
| In case you are thinking anybody could create an account under
| his name ...I provide you with an additional reference:
| https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...
|
| Lets just accept most of Academy nowadays is not far from a
| total joke.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| He's a psychologist who wrote his book _prior_ to the
| replication crisis in social psychology. I read "Thinking
| fast and slow" with a companion piece that detailed the most
| flawed parts of the book. I read that blog post _before_ I
| read the book. There 's basically no psychology you can read
| without some degree of BS in them so I love reading books
| which have already been thoroughly scrutinized. Some chapters
| were very well grounded, others like ch4 I didn't even bother
| reading.
|
| I don't know where you got the impression that MOST of his
| research got undermined by that blog post when that blog post
| mostly took down a few chapters. If anything Kahneman
| impressed me for coming out of the replication crisis with
| not much more than a blown off limb. It would be great if
| Kahneman got everything perfect the first go of things but it
| was practically the point of his book that it's incredibly
| difficult to not make the exact mistakes that he ended up
| making.
|
| The above posters general point is correct that the author
| doesn't really understand Kahneman's work, otherwise they
| would not have phrased things the way they did.
| belter wrote:
| Just wanted to let you know that although I do not entirely
| agree with them, I appreciated both yours, and leephillips
| ( just above), well thought and considered responses.
| leephillips wrote:
| Yes, that one. You exaggerate when you say that "most" of the
| book's findings were undermined, but a good chunk of them
| were, including most of the principal findings of one of the
| chapters. And note that Kahneman had the integrity and
| objectivity to accept that he had been taken in by some non-
| replicable results, and has been totally clear, honest, and
| straightforward about what results that he described in his
| book are reliable and which should probably be discounted.
| Maybe he was too credulous when he wrote the book, but no one
| realized at the time how much of social psychology would
| collapse. He has provided a model of how an academic should
| react when faced with uncomfortable evidence.
| msteffen wrote:
| One of the examples given on Twitter that I found enlightening
| (not an expert so I hope I'm interpreting this correctly): if
| you have a homeostatic system, you would specifically expect to
| find less correlation between the components than between
| causally unrelated quantities (e.g. when the correlation
| between the position of a chicken's body the position of the
| same chicken's head is lower than the correlation between the
| position of the chicken's body and a different chicken's head:
| https://imgur.com/gallery/vgcxL)
| NoahTheDuke wrote:
| From the post:
|
| > I'm sure that my above post is unfair in the sense that these
| three people spent several years working hard on a book, and I'm
| basing my entire reaction on some combination of the title, a
| technical error that someone found, and an interview where one of
| the authors was maybe a bit too relaxed. These three pieces of
| information are in no way a summary of the actual book!
|
| And here we see System 1 in action, helping write a reaction to a
| book not even read yet.
| vannevar wrote:
| I would argue that in the driving example, there _is_ in fact
| correlation, but the data set (a single drive) is insufficient to
| detect it. If you analyzed the data from a thousand different
| drives over the same road, the correlation between speed and gas
| pedal pressure would indeed become apparent. Perhaps the book 's
| authors might better have said that if causation exists, there
| must exist a set of measurements that can reveal the
| corresponding correlation.
|
| Or are there cases where causation exists, but no amount of data
| will reveal correlation?
| jlizzle30 wrote:
| I was inspired to go into psychology after reading Malcom
| Gladwell, Freakonomics, et al. Net-net the degree was
| disapointing. In some ways an intuitive sense of people is
| superior to what the field's been able to discover. 'Noise' is a
| good descriptor.
|
| Thank god I transferred into CS.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-24 23:03 UTC)