[HN Gopher] Daniel Kahneman has died
___________________________________________________________________
Daniel Kahneman has died
Author : mrjaeger
Score : 679 points
Date : 2024-03-27 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| paulpauper wrote:
| wow ..didn't realize he was so old .He was always on the tips of
| people's tongues, never seemed old or dated or faded away even at
| 90. He was at his peak intellectual influence or trajectory,
| which is uncommon for someone so old; most careers peak at 40-60.
| Not only that, his reputation fully unblemished and unmarred,
| which is also increasingly uncommon.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's hard to think of any public intellectual whose career was on
| the peak of its trajectory as his was, and at such and advanced
| age. Usually someone has a few ideas and they fade with time, but
| not him. The neoclassical assumptions had crashed after 2008 and
| this guy comes along with his books and upends the whole
| economics establishment.
| FabHK wrote:
| The Chicago School was criticised not only by behavioural
| economists and psychologists, though, but also by other (fairly
| orthodox, eg New Keynesian) economists [0]. This is not to
| distract from Kahneman's monumental contributions (many
| together with Tversky, as narrated in the book _The Undoing
| Project_ by Michael Lewis).
|
| [0] see e.g.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.htm...
| bwestergard wrote:
| Perhaps Stiglitz, who similarly undermined faith in core
| neoclassical assumptions?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
|
| https://kahneman.scholar.princeton.edu/
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/27/daniel-... |
| https://archive.today/tZY2w ("The Washington Post: Daniel
| Kahneman, Nobel-winning economist, dies at 90")
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/daniel-ka... |
| https://archive.today/MpDes ("Bloomberg: Daniel Kahneman,
| Psychologist Who Upended Economics, Dies at 90")
| OliverJones wrote:
| Let us not forget his collaborator, Amos Tversky, who died young
| in 1996, and who certainly would have been a co-prize-winner had
| he lived.
| zug_zug wrote:
| I'm not one to give an exaggerated eulogy nor rhapsodize about
| all those "Books with a white cover and a weird picture" -- but I
| will say I read thinking fast and slow for the first time last
| year, after decades of resisting, and felt it covered some
| generally profound ideas that still are relevant as ever and not
| widely understood.
|
| (Though at some point, maybe the 2nd half of the book, drags on
| and you can skip most of those chapters. If you don't have time
| for that, I'm sure chat GPT can give you a taste of the main
| premises and you can probe deeper from there.)
| mistercow wrote:
| It's worth noting that many of the results in Thinking, Fast
| and Slow didn't hold up to replication.
|
| It's still very much worth reading in its own right, but now
| implicitly comes bundled with a game I like to call "calibrate
| yourself on the replication crisis". Playing is simple: every
| time the book mentions a surprising result, try to guess
| whether it replicated. Then search online to see if you got it
| right.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Yeah I wouldn't read too much into any single study. But what
| I would defend vigorously is System1 / System2 distinction as
| something so clear/fundamental that you can see it constantly
| once you understand it.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| That's not him though.
|
| Like, it was in all my cog psych textbooks more than twenty
| years ago, with cites back in the 80s (which weren't him).
|
| This is my favourite paper of theirs:
| http://stats.org.uk/statistical-
| inference/TverskyKahneman197...
|
| I got into a bunch of trouble with some reviewers of my
| thesis for referencing this repeatedly.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| It's also very common in psychology theories, I haven't
| read "Thinking, fast and slow" but I imagine there's more
| than Kahneman's own papers cited:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory
| zug_zug wrote:
| wow, it looks like "dual process" theory is basically the
| same thing.
|
| I don't know if there's a better text on dual-process
| theory out there (perhaps by the original authors), but
| regardless of who originated it, I think it's something
| worth learning about for everyone (and if you don't have
| a better source then Thinking Fast and Slow is a very
| good one).
| rileyphone wrote:
| It's just such a bad name though.
| underdeserver wrote:
| In software we often call it fastpath and slowpath :)
| lupire wrote:
| It's been called "emotion / intuition" and "logic" for
| centuries or millennia before the goofy System name was
| invented.
| raincole wrote:
| Ironically people like System 1/2 more than
| intuition/logic because the terms sound more like they
| are coined by System 2.
| derbOac wrote:
| ... except the distinction was being made in various forms
| long before Kahneman, and does get questioned. When you
| start to poke at it, what's intuitive starts to seem less
| so.
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691612460
| 6...
|
| (that's a link to a defense of dual process theories, but
| it makes clear there's increasing criticism of them)
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| Does anyone have a link to a publicly accessible version
| of this paper?
| derbOac wrote:
| I think this should work:
|
| https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/04/dua...
|
| There's review paper coming from a more critical
| perspective in Psych Bulletin or Psych Review I was
| looking for, but I couldn't find it atm.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I wonder if it's better to have a lot of small hits or a few
| big hits and many misses in regard to replication. If the
| studies which have the greatest implications replicate, then
| maybe many misses is not that bad.
| btilly wrote:
| That's an interesting theoretical question.
|
| Unfortunately the reality is that the more interesting and
| quotable the result is, the less likely it is to replicate.
| So replication problems most strongly hit things that seem
| like they should have the greatest implications.
|
| Kind of a "worst of all worlds" scenario.
| ethanbond wrote:
| And critically, scientific publications are incentivized
| likewise to publish the most outlandish claims they can
| possibly get away with. That same incentive affects
| individual scientists, who disproportionately _submit_
| the most outlandish claims they can possibly get away
| with. The boring stuff -- true or not -- is not worth the
| hassle of putting into a publishable article.
| btilly wrote:
| And then the most outlandish of these are picked up by
| popular science writers. Who proceed to mangle it beyond
| recognition, and add a random spin. This then goes to the
| general public.
|
| Some believe the resulting garbage. And wind up with
| weird ideas.
|
| Others use that garbage to justify throwing out
| everything that scientists say. And then double down on
| random conspiracy theories, denialism, and pseudoscience.
|
| I wish there was a solution to this. But everyone is
| actually following their incentives here. :-(
| lupire wrote:
| The scientists push it on the pop writers, to created a
| Personal Brand and an industrial complex around their pet
| theory.
| btilly wrote:
| The density of non-replicable results varies by chapter.
|
| You can ignore anything said in chapter 4 about priming for
| example.
|
| See https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-
| scientific-pe... for more.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| What's wild to me is that _anyone_ could read chapter 4 and
| not look up the original papers in disbelief.
|
| Long before the controversy was public I was reading that
| book and, despite claims that the reader _must_ believe the
| findings, it sounded like nonsense to me. So I looked up
| the original paper to see what the experiment set up was,
| and it was unquestionably a ridiculous conclusion to draw
| from a deeply flawed experiment.
|
| I still never understood how that chapter got through
| without anyone else having the same reaction I did.
| dwighttk wrote:
| In those times, that was exactly the kind of thing that
| people wanted to believe
| foobiekr wrote:
| I had exactly this reaction to Malcolm gladwell. It is
| completely obvious that gladwell across multiple books
| has never once read one of his references and
| consistently misrepresents what they say.
| kbenson wrote:
| I have a slightly different take on him, which comes to
| the same ultimate end on how I view his work.
|
| As he's shifted from primarily a journalist to primarily
| a storyteller, he's chosen to sacrifice additional
| information and accuracy in lieu of telling a consistent
| and compelling narrative that support what he thinks is
| the important thing to take away, not necessarily what
| you would take away were you to review all the same
| information yourself.
|
| Under that understanding, I find him fun to listen to.
| The things he "reports" on/illuminates are interesting,
| but at this point I don't assume he's giving them an even
| handed representation, so his conclusions are not
| necessarily my own, and at best it's a set of things to
| look into and research myself if I find my interest
| piqued after a fun or interesting story is told.
| Nurw wrote:
| Haha, yeah, I am reading the book these days, and I
| clearly remember thinking that those effects seemed
| really exaggerated.
| amoshebb wrote:
| is there a 'thinking fast and slow: the reproducible bits'
| recut? I know with films there's fan made edits.
| Benjammer wrote:
| We need O'Reilly: The Good Parts for books...
| mistermann wrote:
| A fun question _especially considering the topic of the
| thread_ : are propositions that lack proof necessarily
| false?
| kmacdough wrote:
| No, but propositions with strong counter-evidence
| generally are, which is the main topic here. "Not-
| repicable" generally means "attempted to replicate, but
| got results inconsistent with the original conclusion."
| kbenson wrote:
| A very good point (I'm not sure if it's relevant to the
| book in question, as I haven't read it or if you're
| referring just about the conversation so far). It seems
| like many people will take a strong claim they are
| dubious about, and on finding the evidence is sparse,
| inconclusive, or missing, swing to assuming that
| statement is false, instead of a more neutral position of
| "I have no opinion or some reason to think is unlikely,
| but others think it is unlikely even if poorly supported
| or unsupported."
|
| This tendency seems to be capitalized on fairly heavily
| in political media by finding some poorly supported
| assertion of the other side to criticize, which causes
| people to assume the opposite is true.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| > ...are propositions that lack proof necessarily false?
|
| I'll have you know you just nearly nerd sniped a
| mathematician ;-)
| ilya_m wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or,
| in less dramatic terms, if you cannot reject the null,
| you should operate on the assumption that the null holds.
| chefandy wrote:
| Of course not, but the more important and difficult
| questions address how we should reason about, evaluate,
| and present ideas that lack proof.
| btilly wrote:
| Not necessarily false.
|
| But such a small fraction of possible propositions are
| true that it is unlikely to be worthwhile to waste much
| time on propositions with no evidence.
| localhost wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a
| long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and
| Slow taking into account the current state of research. Oh,
| and do it in the voice, style and structure of Tim Urban
| complete with crappy stick figure drawings."
| paulolc wrote:
| Awesome prompt!
| freedomben wrote:
| Same! Just earlier today I was wanting to do this with
| "The Moral Animal" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel."
|
| It's probably the AI thing I'm most excited about, and I
| suspect we're not far from that, although I'm betting the
| copyright battles are the primary obstacle to such a
| future at this point.
| ghaff wrote:
| The thing with _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ is that it make
| it essentially _all_ about geographic determinism. There
| 's another book ( _Why the West Rules--For Now_ written
| before China had really fully emerged on the stage) which
| argues that, yes, geography played an important role in
| which cores emerged earliest. BUT if you look at the
| sweep of history, the eastern core was arguably more
| advanced than the western core at various times. So a
| head start can 't be the only answer.
| usrnm wrote:
| The book specifically considers Eurasia to be one
| geographical region and it does acknowledge the
| technological developments in China. The fact that Europe
| became the winner in this race, according to GGS, is a
| sign that while geography is important it does not
| determine the course of history. It is not all about
| geographic determinism
| worik wrote:
| It is a snapshot in time, and so wrong if viewed in a
| longer context.
|
| People from Europe, came to have the Industrial
| Revolution at just the correct moment.
|
| Some small changes in history and it would have happened
| in India.
|
| It is making a theory to fit the facts.
|
| I do not think the author is a "white supremacist" but
| the book reads like that. Taking all the accidents of
| history and making them seem like destiny that Europeans
| rule the world (they do not, they never did, and they are
| fading from world domination fast)
| pigeons wrote:
| I thought the OP was joking!
| abirch wrote:
| I would actually like to have books that had "Thinking
| Fast and Slow" as a prerequisite. Many data visualization
| books could be summed up as a bar chart is easily
| consumed by System 1. The visual noise creates mental
| strain on System 2.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Then we just need the LLM that will rewrite your book
| taking into account the current state of LLM
| hallucination behaviour.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "please finish game of thrones treating the impending
| zombie invasion as an allegory for global warming"
|
| Also please omit "who has a better story than bran"
| stevage wrote:
| Didn't George say it _is_ such an allegory?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Not me, if I'm going to take the time to read something,
| I want it to have been written, reviewed and edited by a
| human. There is far too much high fidelity information to
| assimilate that I'm missing out on to put in low fidelity
| stuff
| tgv wrote:
| Isn't that because the replications only looked at a
| selected subset of all the possible literature? You can be
| almost sure that if an article's conclusion hinges on a
| wide interpretation of the experimental result, or the
| stimuli haven't been sampled properly (and who knows the
| distribution of stimuli?) or the subjects are first year
| psych students, and the proof is a rejection of the null
| hypothesis, that it cannot be replicated. The worst
| offenders are those that conclude their theory is true
| because the theory they argue against is rejected.
| cranium wrote:
| For what it's worth, Kahnman answered a post that scrutinized
| the effect of priming:
| https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-
| of-a-...
| pigscantfly wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this -- I read the book maybe a decade
| ago and largely discounted it as non-replicable pop-sci;
| this changed my opinion of Kahneman's perspective and rigor
| (for the better!)
| airstrike wrote:
| It looks like it's a bit more nuanced than that. What I saw
| from the link was some debate about what holds and what
| doesn't for various forms of "priming"
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| The general idea is very simple. Tactical vs strategic
| thinking are two different things and it's good to be aware
| of that. I don't know that that needs to be proven or
| disproven
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| 19th Century definition of tactics aas being everything
| that happens within the range of cannons and strategy as
| everything that happens outside of cannon range, fits well
| to thinking fast (tactics) and slow (strategy).
| sampo wrote:
| > It's worth noting that many of the results in Thinking,
| Fast and Slow didn't hold up to replication.
|
| Irony is, Kahneman had himself written a paper warning about
| generalizing from studies with small sample sizes:
|
| _" Suppose you have run an experiment on 20 subjects, and
| have obtained a significant re- sult which confirms your
| theory (z = 2.23, p < .05, two-tailed). You now have cause to
| run an additional group of 10 subjects. What do you think the
| probability is that the results will be significant, by a
| one-tailed test, separately for this group?"_
|
| _" Apparently, most psychologists have an exaggerated belief
| in the likelihood of successfully replicating an obtained
| finding. The sources of such beliefs, and their consequences
| for the conduct of scientific inquiry, are what this paper is
| about."_
|
| Then 40 years later, he fell into the same trap. He became
| one of the "most psychologists".
|
| http://stats.org.uk/statistical-
| inference/TverskyKahneman197...
| yawboakye wrote:
| psychology isn't science. it's a grave mistake to
| read/interpret it a such. does that mean it's useless? of
| course not: some of the findings (and i use findings very
| loosely) help us adjust our prior probabilities. if we're
| right in the end, we were lucky. otherwise we just weren't.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| That's an unexpected position for me.
|
| How do you define science? Could it be a science, according
| to you, or is there something fundamentally non-scientific
| about it?
| yawboakye wrote:
| it's fundamentally unscientific at this point. much of
| our current science lies in the realm of natural law. so
| far we haven't found any laws that govern human behavior.
| what we know, with considerable certainty, is that
| behavior can be positively influenced. but at the point
| of action, nothing we know of compels any
| specific/predictable behavior. until we have found rigid
| laws of reasons that apply to both the brute and the
| civilized, any 'discoveries' of psychology are reports of
| someone's idiosyncrasies, imho.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Is it not scientific to say that X property is true of
| human behavior more often that it is not with statistical
| significance?
| worik wrote:
| > How do you define science?
|
| Science is that which could be disproved.
|
| It is a very small, and very important, part of human
| knowledge.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| The history of science generally doesn't seem to be
| characterized by shifts in theory due to empirical
| disproofs. Usually, when theories are "disproved", we
| don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but
| rather, we want to stick to the theory and try to patch
| it up. When Uranus didn't seem to be moving according to
| the predictions of Newtonian mechanics (a disproof!),
| physicists didn't throw out Newton, they posited the
| existence of another planet. And they turned out to be
| right, Neptune existed.
|
| See Chalmers' _What is This Thing Called Science?_ for an
| introduction to these kinds of topics, or Kuhn and
| Feyerabend 's work for historical responses. (And the
| Duhem-Quine thesis for the "auxiliary hypothesis"
| response to falsifiability I hinted at with my example.)
| satellite2 wrote:
| I think psychology is very successful at categorizing abd
| treating mental illnesses. The DSM is really a monument and
| hold for most of its part very well to scrutiny.
|
| Where psychology is massively failing to replicate is in
| trying to characterise healthy individuals. Typically the
| work of Kahneman.
|
| But that's what interest people and sells, pop psychology.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Genuinely curious, how would you scrutinize a
| categorization tool that includes both causes and effects
| in its key?
|
| I'm only tangentially following the whole
| autism/Asperger's/ADD/ADHD development, and I'm growing
| more and more convinced that all these categories are
| mostly arbitrary constructs grown out of random history
| and academia politics. Happy to be proved wrong here,
| though.
| davetannenbaum wrote:
| His own work held up very well to replication. It's when he
| is citing the work of other scholars (in particular, that of
| social psychologists) that doesn't hold up well to
| replication.
| canjobear wrote:
| "When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction
| is often disbelief . . . The idea you should focus on,
| however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are
| not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no
| choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these
| studies are true."
| importantbrian wrote:
| This game is doubly valuable when the surprising result
| confirms one of your existing beliefs. I'm pretty good about
| doing this for surprising results that contradict a belief I
| hold, but I have to be extra disciplined about doing it when
| it confirms one of my beliefs.
| acchow wrote:
| > calibrate yourself on the replication crisis
|
| I imagine that in 30 years, it will become clear that
| individual humans display enormous diversity, their diversity
| increasing as societal norms relax, and their behavior
| changing as the culture around them change. As such,
| replication is hopeless and trying to turn "psychology" into
| a science was a futile endeavor.
|
| That is not to say that psychology cannot be helpful, just
| that we cannot infer rational conclusions or predictions from
| it the same way we can from hard sciences.
|
| Self help books are enormously helpful, but they're
| definitely not science either.
| richrichie wrote:
| Experiments involving grad students dont correlate well with
| how (normal) people behave in real life.
| cvwright wrote:
| I find that most nonfiction books follow a common structure:
|
| * 1st third of the book: Lays out the basic ideas, gives
| several examples
|
| * 2nd third of the book: More examples that repeat the themes
| from the 1st part
|
| * 3rd third of the book: ??? I usually give up at this point
|
| I sometimes wish that more books were like "The Mom Test" -
| just long enough to say what they need, even if that makes for
| a short book.
| voisin wrote:
| Because most nonfiction books are one, relatively small set
| of ideas (profound or not, novel or not) that could be
| concisely written as a few blog posts or a single long form
| article, but in order to monetize and build the author's
| brand, get exaggerated into a full book. It is really painful
| and something I hope GPT will help the rest of us cut through
| in the future ("summarize the points. Dig into that point.
| What evidence is given? Etc etc etc" as a conversation rather
| than wasting 30 hours reading noise for a book)
| owisd wrote:
| You can just leverage the "second brain" crowd -- for every
| vaguely well-known non-fiction book someone has written up
| a summary for themselves and posted it on their blog.
| ratg13 wrote:
| Most people don't absorb concepts immediately with only a
| simple explanation.
|
| Unless you are reading a topic you are already familiar
| with, reinforcement of an idea helps you to examine a
| concept from different angles and to solidify what is being
| discussed.
|
| If everyone fully absorbed and understood everything they
| read, schooling could be completed years in advance.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Apart from CYOA, I think a hypertext "book" would be the
| most effective way to dynamically scale detail
| preferences without resorting to skimming or skipping.
|
| Some people want more or less evidence based on their
| level of skepticism or critical thinking, while others
| want more evidence to reinforce the soundness of their
| inferred position on a topic, especially if it's a topic
| unfamiliar to them. Other people are under time
| constraints and just want the key points and a brief
| presentation.
| olvy0 wrote:
| That's exacerbating the original environmental problem, in
| addition to thick paper books, filled with filler material
| just to promote the author's brand, you now want to waste
| electricity on running an LLM that will give you a the
| short version? That's.... short sighted.
|
| This should be dealt with by pressuring the publishing
| industry not to inflate books and fill them with fluff.
| This could be done by not buying these kind of books, and
| publicly shaming publishers who engage in this behavior.
| It's easier in non fiction books since the amount of fluff
| in fiction books is a more subjective matter.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Except that a lot of people read these books for the
| entertainment value of the anecdotes, and a lot of people
| enjoy feeling self-important for having read long books.
| flawn wrote:
| The latter will happen already by more and more people
| doing ways to summarize books
| mattmaroon wrote:
| They do it because a short book looks like a pamphelet
| and nobody will buy it. Most Gladwell books could easily
| be 30 pages, but nobody will pay $14.99 for that.
|
| You can't shame them into buying books they can't sell.
|
| How much electricity does it take an LLM to summarize a
| book? I'm sure the carbon emissions involved are trivial,
| and if they aren't, I've always been of the belief that
| (like eating meat) people are going to do what they want
| to do regardless of the environmental cost, so it's
| better to focus your ire on reducing the environmental
| cost. The problem here isn't using an LLM to summarize a
| book, it's that we've got a power grid fueled mainly by
| fossil fuels. (That is a problem that will fix itself in
| no time anyway now that renewables are cheaper and the
| gap is widening.)
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > They do it because a short book looks like a pamphelet
| and nobody will buy it. Most Gladwell books could easily
| be 30 pages, but nobody will pay $14.99 for that.
|
| This applies equally to Sci-Fi and fantasy doorstopper
| novels. At least those have interesting filler--sometimes
| even better than the main story.
| geodel wrote:
| Well, life of most people on the earth is just same boring
| repetitions with few novel events. So I wonder what would
| people do with their ample amount of saved time thanks to
| ChatGPT. Perhaps writing another Javascript framework,
| launch new food delivery apps besides raging on social
| media.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _I sometimes wish that more books were like "The Mom Test" -
| just long enough to say what they need, even if that makes
| for a short book._
|
| most non fiction could be well-summarized as a lengthy blog
| post
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I'd go further: many non-fiction books could be losslessly
| compressed into a tweet.
|
| (Looking at you, _The Checklist Manifesto_ )
| yboris wrote:
| Reading a book, say 10 hours, is like a meditation on an
| idea: you get numerous examples of it and a variety ways
| of thinking about it.
|
| Our brains learn best when they encounter something often
| across time (spaced repetition).
|
| Reading a single tweet _may_ summarize the book, but the
| chances of you recalling the idea in an appropriate
| situation is much lower than if you had spent hours on
| it.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I agree, and there are many books which are well worth
| the time it takes to read them. All I'm saying is that
| there are many other books which aren't.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| HAHAHA. :@D Challenge accepted.
|
| _The right checklist organizes uniformity, success, and
| safety in almost every human endeavor._ -
| @SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs
| prionassembly wrote:
| Counterexample: Gilles Deleuze's "Empiricism and
| Subjectivity".
| vundercind wrote:
| Mainly a business and self-help "airport book" problem.
| Sometimes pop-science.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Perhaps nonfiction works could be ordered neatly such that
| the thesis and support material isn't buried, but arranged in
| a tiered detailed manner conducive to a "Choose Your Own
| Adventure"-like skipping of material. Short-form and long-
| form must find a way to coexist and be useful without
| critical compromise. It's not like everyone has or should
| need Cliff Notes or getAbstract.
| dionidium wrote:
| I always think of this from Aaron Swartz:
|
| > _But let's say you can narrow it down to one good one, and
| you can find the time to read it. You plunk down an absurd
| $30 (of which, I'm told, less than $3 goes to the author) for
| a bulky hardcover and you quickly discover that the author
| doesn't have all that much to say. But a book is a big thing,
| and they had to fill it all up, so the author padded it.
| There are several common techniques._
|
| > _One is to repeat your point over and over, each time
| slightly differently. This is surprisingly popular. Writing a
| book on how code is law, an idea so simple it can fit in the
| book's title? Just give example after example after example._
|
| > _Another is to just fill the book with unnecessary detail.
| Arguing that the Bush administration is incompetent? Fill
| your book up with citation after citation. (Readers must love
| being hit over the head with evidence for a claim they're
| already willing to believe.)_
|
| > _I have nothing against completeness, accuracy, or
| preciseness, but if you really want a broad audience to hear
| what you have to say, you've got to be short. Put the
| details, for the ten people who care about them, on your
| website. Then take the three pages you have left, and put
| them on your website too._
|
| Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001229
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > 3rd third of the book: ??? I usually give up at this point
|
| History of science books thankfully stave off that final
| third until at least 80%. However, their final chapter or two
| universally manages to be a letdown. It's either wild
| optimistic speculation, hype for a theory that's debunked 5
| years after publication, or a focus that accidentally
| happened to predict the course of science post-publication.
| The story is told in a tonally jarring manner compared to the
| tight narrative in the rest of the book.
|
| My #1 suspect for this disease is a desire to connect the
| content of the book to real life. Such attempts miss more
| often than they drive the point home, even if they're
| factually correct.
| musiciangames wrote:
| As a sample of 1, it seems to me that this is particularly an
| issue with American non-fiction.
| dwighttk wrote:
| It's the only one of those books I still don't regret telling
| people "it's good" a decade later (with a couple caveats)
| chx wrote:
| Let me summarize: the highest scored comment on hacker news to
| the death of Daniel Kahneman says the second half of his book
| can be replaced by an automated plagiarism machine.
|
| Y'all are hopeless and deserve what's coming for you. The only
| problem is, I will also be buried under it and so will everyone
| else but that can't be helped, it seems.
| someguydave wrote:
| Old man yells at clouds
| supafastcoder wrote:
| > it covered some generally profound ideas that still are
| relevant as ever and not widely understood
|
| I've tried to read this book over and over again to understand
| what everyone is talking about but never found the insights
| that useful in practice. Like, what have you been able to apply
| these insights too? What good is it to know that we have a slow
| mode of thinking and a fast way? Genuine question.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| When to trust your instincts /intuition (eg. when few facts
| are known, there are no critical central deciding factors,
| but it's important to take a decision and move forward) and
| when to stop trusting your instincts and reflect a little (eg
| someone is trying to rush you into making a buying decision).
|
| When it's likely that your biased, and try to work around
| that (highly related to above). (Eg. When don't make critical
| decisions when you're sleep deprived)
|
| How you can utilize other people lacking this ability. (eg
| utilize it in sales processes)
| brightball wrote:
| The Undoing Project is a solid read about his life and work
| too.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I guess I'm one of the rare folks who started reading TFAS and
| left without any big revelations or takeaways. I got bored half
| way through and stopped. Shrug...
| pineaux wrote:
| Had the exact same experience. Maybe someone can enlighten us
| with why this is -supposedly- such a revelatory book?
| ceuk wrote:
| Assuming this is a genuine question and not just
| intellectual posturing the obvious answer if you've ever
| spoken to.. most people.. is that a lot of the (admittedly
| somewhat simple) concepts in the book are for whatever
| reason, not part of the general public psyche
| bartread wrote:
| I know Daniel Kahneman only through reading him. Like you, I
| found Thinking Fast & Slow incredibly useful, first reading it
| perhaps 10 years ago. Definitely 2014, and I can't believe
| that's 10 years ago.
|
| I must admit this headline shocked me for the simple reason
| that... I straight up had no idea that he was so old.
|
| Thank you, Daniel, for the way you've influenced my (and our)
| thinking in ways that are still impacting us today, both in
| work and in the rest of life. Rest in peace.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| More meta is that, when people in aggregate are stressed and
| not all that wise or informed, they tend to look for
| convenience and expediency rather than effort and mastery.
| Unfortunately, this can also happen when people are apathetic
| or not stressed and slack off on reasonable skepticism or fail
| to dig into the details.
|
| Leadership, pride, excellence, empathy, and fairness must not
| fail into the decay of jingoist buzzwords and remain values
| with intent and actions that remain unwavering.
|
| The greatest danger is dishonesty when words stop having
| ordinary meanings, when people stop talking to each other, or
| when they're a lack of agreement on the obvious intersection of
| a shared reality.
| AlgoRitmo wrote:
| I have a physical copy and only read about 2 chapters, after
| having it for years. I need to take it on a flight to finally
| get around to reading it. It seems like one of those books you
| have to own and read at least once.
| John23832 wrote:
| Wow. I was just looking him up yesterday to see if he had written
| anything else. Sad. Be blessed.
| jarcoal wrote:
| Damn, I'm reading Thinking Fast and Slow right now. RIP.
| zebomon wrote:
| Thinking Fast and Slow made a tremendous impact on me when I read
| it (multiple times) in the 2010s. What curiosity and what clarity
| of thought this man had. His influence will continue to be felt!
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Me too, I think a bunch of it was found to be reproducible
| though.
|
| https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...
|
| Same thing is happening w/ a lot of the work of Dan Ariely, but
| I think his situation is much worse.
| FabHK wrote:
| I don't recall any suggestion of foul play with
| Kahneman/Tversky, unlike Ariely.
| lupire wrote:
| Ariely has rained Kahneman's reputation because the average
| person doesn't distinguish "pop behavioral scientist".
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| "people [are] endlessly complicated and interesting."
| yodon wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39840447
| dredmorbius wrote:
| FYI, that's been redirected to this post:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841183>
| micah94 wrote:
| I remember years ago Penn Jillette talking about his book
| "Thinking Fast and Slow". And I was like why is a magician
| talking about a book written by an economist?? Well, read it and
| you'll understand why it fits so well with their brand of magic.
| Dr. Kahneman expresses in words what's going on in your brain
| while watching someone like them perform.
| astrodust wrote:
| There's a lot of "magic" in that book where your pre-
| conceptions are completely subverted.
| bumby wrote:
| FWIW, I believe Kahneman resisted being categorized as an
| economist and preferred to think of himself as a psychologist.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's a school of thought which holds that economics is a
| subset of psychology.
|
| I'd thought that this was reflected in some university
| departmental organisation, with M.I.T. being the one that
| came to mind. Despite there being a behavioural economics
| section there, though, so far as I'm aware Economics remains
| its own department.
|
| Kahneman's training and primary focus were both in
| psychology, but he _was_ awarded the somewhat problematic
| Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Multi-
| discipliniarity is in fact A Thing.
|
| Princeton bio:
|
| _Daniel Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public
| Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and
| International Affairs.... He has been the recipient of many
| awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution
| Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and
| the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky,
| the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists
| (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General
| Psychology (1995), the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences
| (2002), the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American
| Psychological Association (2007), and the Presidential Medal
| of Freedom (2013)._
|
| <https://kahneman.scholar.princeton.edu/>
| foobiekr wrote:
| Psychology could legitimately be considered a subset of
| economics.
| alephknoll wrote:
| If economics is a subset of psychology and psychology is
| a subset of economics, then economics equals psychology.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Is all human behaviour mercantile?
|
| The counterargument to the proposition in my earlier post
| would be to show that there is economic activity which
| relies on nonhuman behaviours. Automated financial
| trading or AI-based management systems (financial,
| corporate, industrial, governmental, etc.) might be
| possible exceptions, which raises further interesting
| questions.
| tomrod wrote:
| Economics since the mid 1900s hasn't been solely focused
| on mercantilism, but rather has had a significant focus
| on choice under various conditions, assumptions, and
| constraints. Game theory, mechanism design, contract and
| auction deisgn, and focus on individual versus collective
| behavior (e.g Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) have strong
| overlap with psychology.
|
| Though there is certainly daylight: my subfields of
| Industrial Organization and Computational eocnomics are
| way more related to quantitative finance, ML, and similar
| than voting behavior.
| bumby wrote:
| I may be misremembering here (or perhaps projecting), but I
| vaguely remember the issue being that economics tried to
| portray itself as too much of a "hard science" for
| Khaneman's liking.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| As someone trained in the study, I'd tend to agree with
| him.
| fastandslow wrote:
| Fantastic book - I certainly had to read it slowly, not fast.
|
| Two things bothered me about it though - firstly, it landed
| shortly before the reproducibility issues of such research became
| more widely known.
|
| Secondly - towards the end of the book, it espouses the idea that
| using some methods of psychlogical and behavoural manipulation is
| at worst a net neutral, especially if there was nothing to see of
| the manipluation in question. After all, who can argue against
| organ donation being opt-out by default, or similar?
|
| To me, this is like a magician claiming that there was no sleight
| of hand, as we were free to look wherever we liked during their
| performance. Denying the presence and capabailities of tools of
| manipulation is, in my opinion, incredibly dangerous, and the
| worst of its outcomes has been very publicly played out in recent
| years.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve, as they used
| to say in the pie factory where I worked. But the belly knows.
| Yes, it's a dangerous, cavalier idea. But from an endlessly
| complicated and interesting thinker.
| Retric wrote:
| > some methods of psychlogical and behavoural manipulation
|
| I think you may be objecting to the idea of manipulation here
| rather than his point. Influence is not necessarily bad, if a
| dentist notices some poster which causes his patients to floss
| more shouldn't he keep it up?
|
| Suggesting all manipulation is bad implies we shouldn't do
| public health education etc if it happens to be effective.
| fastandslow wrote:
| But it never stops at "this thing we want to encourage is
| obviously good with absolutely no downsides".
|
| After all, floss is a single-use plastic, generally made of
| PTFE, the production of which requires all sorts of nasty
| forever chemicals.
| fastandslow wrote:
| Fantastic book - I certainly had to read it slowly, not fast.
|
| Two things bothered me about it though - firstly, it landed
| shortly before the reproducibility issues of such research became
| more widely known.
|
| Secondly - towards the end of the book, it espouses the idea that
| using some methods of psychlogical and behavoural manipulation is
| at worst a net neutral, especially if there was nothing to see of
| the manipluation in question. After all, who can argue against
| organ donation being opt-out by default, or similar?
|
| To me, this is like a magician claiming that there was no sleight
| of hand, as we were free to look wherever we liked during their
| performance. Denying the presence and capabailities of tools of
| manipulation is, in my opinion, incredibly dangerous, and the
| worst of its outcomes has been very publicly played out in recent
| years.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I think the argument is whether or not we admit we are having
| these effects and take responsibility for them, we are doing
| them.
|
| I personally find that telling people exactly what I intend to
| do makes it more effective rather than less. But in a field
| where we can change people's behavior by making a button orange
| instead of blue or presenting a form in one page vs three, I
| find it impossible to pretend that one of those is a neutral
| choice.
|
| Instead, I focus on what it is we are maximizing for, and how
| people feel about the experience. I push my companies to choose
| patterns that help people feel secure & in control, leading to
| predictable outcomes that align with what they actually
| expressed wanting. It means we are collaborating with our
| users, even though we could have used those same techniques to
| make them feel more anxious, spend more money than they
| intended, or buy things they didn't actually need.
| dinp wrote:
| The idea of system 1 and system 2 had a profound impact on me.
| While specific conclusions in the book were reported to be based
| on low quality data, it doesn't take away from the fact that it
| gave me a new mental lens to look at things and understand
| people's behaviour.
| Swizec wrote:
| If you've only read Thinking Fast And Slow, try grabbing a copy
| of his 2021 book Noise. It's a little drier but I found it to be
| a much deeper and more insightful read. Less pop sci, more hard
| research results.
|
| And if I recall correctly he addresses the replication issues
| from Thinking Fast And Slow and discusses more recent research
| that disproves or adds nuance on the older studies. I think it's
| also more practically useful and applicable to everyday life.
| Where TFS gives you a "these are interesting facts about life"
| vibe, Noise is more "here's the problem and this is what you can
| do about it" style.
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| https://archive.md/tZY2w
| suriyaG wrote:
| kahneman was such a fascinating personality. Other than "Thinking
| fast and slow", I highly recommend "The Undoing Project" by
| Michael Lewis about Kahneman and Tversky's incredible journey
| changing the standard economic theory.
|
| Some interesting talks with Daniel Kahneman
|
| - https://www.edge.org/adversarial-collaboration-daniel-kahnem...
|
| - https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
| Kahneman himself reponds in the comment sections to a very
| critical piece about his work.
| FabHK wrote:
| Sad that Tversky, despite being younger, predeceased him by
| nearly 3 decades.
| abirch wrote:
| Don't forget "Noise" it was a great read and great bridge
| between "Thinking Fast and Slow" with "Nudge"
| richrichie wrote:
| Does behavioral economics offer an alternative theory with
| useful predictions? Like, do we have an option pricing model
| that holds up better than models coming out of standard theory?
| COGlory wrote:
| I'm not an economist nor that interested in them, but I did read
| Nassim Taleb's books* and Kahneman stuck out as one of very few
| economists Taleb doesn't totally trash.
|
| * I had read Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance" and was then
| recommended Taleb's books for a more thorough perspective on
| probability, to apply to Koonin's work.
| mgfist wrote:
| Nassim Taleb's opinion of others shouldn't hold much sway - the
| man is a prick.
| zengid wrote:
| I thought he was so witty and refreshing when I read
| AntiFragile (which I will always regard as a masterpiece),
| but I feel like he's ran out of ideas now and is just
| complaining about people he doesn't like.
| COGlory wrote:
| He has an incredible ego, but also seems very self aware.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Taleb really has a high opinion only of himself. A very smart
| man, but also very self-absorbed.
| vik0 wrote:
| >Taleb really has a high opinion only of himself
|
| That's not true though. I can name at least two other
| people on whom he has a high opinion (a.k.a he's praised
| them in his books): Karl Popper and George Soros. There are
| others as well, but most people here will recognize these
| people (I assume) so that's why I mentioned them, and
| admittedly they were the first to pop into my head lol
|
| It's true that he's an asshole on X and in his books, while
| in real life he seems very nice and non-confrontational.
| He's talked about this in an interview he did with the
| Guardian I think a few years ago (maybe a decade ago), and
| if my memory serves me right, he said something to the tune
| of it being easier to get lost when you're not speaking
| directly to someone's face and become more rude than usual
| malshe wrote:
| I know I am nitpicking but Kahneman was not an economist. He
| was a cognitive psychologist. In fact he is the only
| psychologist ever to win a Nobel prize in economics.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Just to add some context, there is no Noble Prize in
| psychology.
| worik wrote:
| And utterly pedantically there is no Nobel prize in
| Economics. It is "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic
| Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel"
|
| Established in 1968
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Great interview Tyler Cowen did with him.
|
| https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daniel-kahneman/
| rasse wrote:
| He truly had that rare combination of gifts for formulating _and_
| expressing ideas clearly.
| kqr wrote:
| Among all the praise for _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ it seems that
| many people have missed out on _Noise_. Also a fantastic book
| that shaped how I approach situations perhaps more than the
| former.
|
| Kahneman was one of those people where I was just waiting to have
| a problem tough enough that I'd have a good reason to email him
| with a question, whether or not I'd get a response. I guess no
| longer.
| mgfist wrote:
| Feel like I'm the only one who couldn't get through Thinking,
| Fast and Slow. Felt like a rambling slog, with most of the
| interesting bits being something that was very common sense to
| me.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I had the same reaction tbh. I managed to get to the end, but
| it was a slow, tedious slog. And maybe it's because I'd already
| read a lot of other pop-psych books, but I barely felt like I
| learned anything new from it.
|
| That aside, I don't doubt that Kahneman was a brilliant mind,
| and I'm saddened by his passing. RIP.
| xutopia wrote:
| When did you read the book? It seems to me that the ideas
| within the book now pervade culture in ways that it didn't when
| it first came out. If you read it recently it could contribute
| to your feeling of this being common sense. Also because this
| idea feels like common sense doesn't mean that it was.
| Evolution is common sense now but it was a revolutionary way to
| think of species when On The Origin Of Species came out.
| vik0 wrote:
| Yup, exactly this
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I couldn't finish this book. It felt like a never-ending stream
| of examples to illustrate a few simple ideas.
| passion__desire wrote:
| I remember one quick reply of Kahneman when Sam and Daniel were
| discussing about intuitions and how people are wrong many times.
|
| Sam Harris jokes, "I have met these people". Daniel replies, "We
| have met them and we see them in mirror" [0]
|
| [0] 17:25 @ https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-
| episodes/150...
| Shrezzing wrote:
| Kahneman's impact on economics can't be understated. The subject
| was becoming a fairly absurd and dogmatically prescriptivist
| practice before Kahneman stirred it up along with a a relatively
| small number of colleagues.
|
| To a large extent, it's still dogmatic and prescriptivist, but
| unorthodox opinions (not just limited to behavioral economics)
| are more accepted & considered following Kahneman's input.
| kolbe wrote:
| Out of both humility and reality, I think even Kahneman would
| give the bulk of the credit to Amos Tversky.
| worik wrote:
| > The subject was becoming a fairly absurd and dogmatically
| prescriptivist practice
|
| That was when I was studying it!
|
| So much rubbish "economics is a science because it uses maths"
| is one favourite of mine.
|
| I did over a decade of study on economics and finance and
| nobody, even once, mentioned Karl Marx, arguably the most
| influential economist in the last two hundred years.
|
| It was very prone to fetishes. "Price mechanism" was one I
| recall. Every problem in society had to be shoe horned into a
| market so the "price mechanism" would get to work.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| He was nudged off his mortal coil too soon.
| graphe wrote:
| His life is filled with tragedy, like his father dying in Vichy
| France and his wife preceding his death. Imagine living forever
| where everyone you know and love dying before you.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The death of reason.
| sonorous_sub wrote:
| I always felt I got more mileage out of the reflexivity of
| Popper, by way of Soros.
| mattpavelle wrote:
| For those who don't know who he is:
|
| Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton
| University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a
| psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral
| economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a
| rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice,
| international political negotiations and the evaluation of
| baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in
| collaboration with Amos Tversky, a Stanford cognitive
| psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and
| decision-making.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| All of this is in the article.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| "advance" and "groundbreaking work" is far from enough. Those
| two basically invented a couple of new sciences.
|
| "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" is the
| paper that made them famous, and it's still a damn good read:
|
| https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyK...
| whyenot wrote:
| I used to play D&D after school with Tal Tversky and Jon
| Barwise at the Tversky's Eichler home on the Stanford campus.
| This was in the early 1980s. I had no idea how famous either of
| my friend's fathers were (or would become). It's sad how young
| both of their parents were when they died.
| randombetch wrote:
| He's a legend! His book made me question my every thought for a
| while D:
| coyotespike wrote:
| Although many of the results in Fast and Slow didn't hold up,
| Kahneman was always refreshingly open and honest about that, and
| keen to identify the limits of knowledge.
|
| Which surely is one of the best things you can say about a
| scientist.
| mxs6 wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to take a cognitive psych grad seminar
| from him in the 90s, co-taught by his wife, Anne Treisman. He
| always seemed given to thinking a little more deeply in the
| moment than most people do.
|
| One half-joking comment he made about science in the real world
| vs some idealized notion of it has always stuck with me. In a
| discussion about whether the results of some paper conflicted
| with some model or theory of cognition, he mused that
| scientific progress in psychology (and other non-hard sciences)
| was really about embarrassing rivals with competing models. No
| high-level model was ever stated precisely enough to rule out
| some particular finding; you could always tweak your theory a
| little to accommodate it. It's just that at some point, you
| might be too embarrassed to do so.
| rvbissell wrote:
| Let's call those tweaks epi(stemological)-cycles.
| trash_cat wrote:
| I did a Cog Sci bachelor and this is the conclusion I made I
| finished my studies. A lot of Thinking Fast and Slow are
| summaries of research done in the field over decades. In
| particular, biases and intuition as internalized
| knowledge/expertise. Sure you can complain about replication
| issues but this is the best model when it comes to minds that
| I know of.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >was always refreshingly open and honest about that,
|
| His work got torn to shreds with science, what did you expect
| him to do?
|
| It really should be embarrassing rather than acceptable. It
| doesnt matter how honest you are AFTER you are caught.
|
| Between the replication crisis and his name on some bad papers,
| the guy seriously didn't care about correctness as much as
| interesting-faux-science.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| There's lots of scientists that deflect and deny
| falsifications.
| elbear wrote:
| Embarrassed because science worked as expected?
| resource_waste wrote:
| Doesn't science require replication? He wrote books based
| on un-replicated studies.
|
| Further, the confidence he extolled about his now debunked
| ideas make him a charlatan. This person was a bad
| scientist. If we esteem people who don't check their data
| and influence millions of people with falsities, we are
| going to create a society with low trust.
|
| Just look at this thread, the man lost respect among the
| people in the know. There are a few people clinging onto
| 'well just because its not true, doesnt mean I didn't find
| it interesting". I'm not sure what we get out of promoting
| anti-science scientists.
| trash_cat wrote:
| Can you be specific what ideas of his aren't scientific?
| It's true that science requires replication but he deals
| with models but perhaps uses bad studies to support it.
| It's like saying he should replicate the theory of
| evolution.
| emeril wrote:
| from the article: "Then the students were asked which was more
| likely: that Linda is a bank teller or that Linda is a bank
| teller and is active in the feminist movement. The vast majority
| went with bank teller and active feminist, which has to be the
| less likely choice because the probability of two conditions will
| always be less than the probability of either one."
|
| Isn't that a bad question to ask, it suggests there are only two
| possible outcomes, wouldn't a better question include a third
| option of "not a bank teller and may or may not be a active
| feminist"?
| istultus wrote:
| Maybe your (anyone's) system 1 might assume only two possible
| outcomes, but it's not in the question - it's which is more
| likely, and one option assuredly is, up to a less-than-or-equal
| sign.
| emeril wrote:
| I hope the actual study wasn't as "tricky" as it was
| referenced in the article re: the Linda example
|
| I'd imagine there's enough stuff Kahneman identified with
| biases that have held up and don't involve artificial
| questions like this designed to trick the respondents whose
| real world applicability seem questionable at best...
|
| further, in the supplied example, I'd argue that the prior
| probability of Linda being a feminist (based on her being an
| activist/etc.) is probably higher than her not being a
| feminist so, in a sense the respondents got it right (i.e.,
| in that population, I'd argue there are more women who are
| bank tellers and feminists than just bank tellers)...
| lupire wrote:
| Yes. You've noticed that most psychological insights and
| paradoxes are actually linguistic ambiguities. But it's more
| fun to ignore that.
| richrichie wrote:
| Wittgenstein says hello!
| Unlisted6446 wrote:
| This aspect was investigated in the literature and broadly
| speaking, the biases still pop-up:
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00350
|
| - It was also touched on in the original paper that Tversky and
| Kahneman put out https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-03110-001
| billfor wrote:
| I read that as assuming that the "bank teller only" answer
| implied that the person was not a feminist, since most people
| would assume that being a bank teller does not make you a
| feminist. In any case, a bad phrasing to give for a survey....
| These questions would be better off being as unambiguous as
| possible.
| kabigon wrote:
| Can we ban paywalled WP articles?
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Fascinating quote I found on his wikipedia page:
|
| "It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to
| wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to
| play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my
| brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was
| walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching.
| He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear
| more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS
| soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed
| that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over,
| picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice
| the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great
| emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet,
| showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home
| more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were
| endlessly complicated and interesting."
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| rip
| aj_nikhil wrote:
| R.I.P a true genius.. hope people discover him now..
| orsenthil wrote:
| Rest in Peace, Ms. Kahneman. May strength be with your family and
| loved ones. Your Thinking Fast and Slow was an influential book.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Kahneman was a giant among men. Anyone rattling on about "the
| replication crisis" probably isn't fit to carry his folders.
| ashton314 wrote:
| For me the best part about reading _Thinking: Fast and Slow_ is
| that I 'm more distrustful of my own thought processes. That
| little bit of questioning of my own conclusions has helped me see
| gaps in my reasoning.
|
| My dream is to one day have the caliber of insights this man had,
| along with his ability to express them so clearly and
| persuasively.
|
| dang, does this deserve a black bar?
| vik0 wrote:
| May he rest in peace
| resource_waste wrote:
| I hope his legacy is destroyed by the replication crisis.
|
| I remember reading his words, they were so confident like: "No,
| this is how the brain actually works."
|
| I think we really need to punish people for being leaders and
| promotiong misinformation. Daniel is at the end of both the
| replication crisis and signing off on bad data.
|
| These people should lose their Nobel prize IMO, the standard
| seems to merely be publishing transitory-scientific-gossip.
| amai wrote:
| About his book: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-
| scientific-pe...
| deadbabe wrote:
| 90 years old, the most common age of death these days.
| roughly wrote:
| I'd second every recommendation in this thread for "Thinking Fast
| And Slow" - it's one of those books that gives you a concept that
| has such immediate salience that it feels like it unlocks some
| part of reality you didn't see before but is totally obvious in
| retrospect.
|
| One of the few other books that's changed my thinking about my
| thinking in similar ways is Annie Murphy Paul's "The Extended
| Mind" - https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-extended-mind-the-power-
| of-... . It's hard to put anything at the level of Thinking Fast
| and Slow, but it felt like reading a sequel to that book.
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