The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
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The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
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Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#2My "choice & behavior" focus in college was pretty obscure at the time so it's cool to see Prospect Theory and other concepts start to go mainstream.
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#3His nobel prize lecture is well worth a watch if you have 37 minutes to spare.
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#4And here's the reason why people who say economics isn't science are (mostly) wrong: economics is (mostly) applied statistics.
Yes, interpretation of the statistics isn't "just science", but when is it ever?
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#5I recently read Kahneman's 2011 book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" -- it should probably be required reading for everybody who's in charge of making decisions that affect a lot of people.
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#6The engineer/lawyer problem explanation
(spoilers)
is only correct in a world where lawyers and engineers have all the same characteristics. That the sampled individual is a man will skew things all by itself.
Of the lawyers, approximately 40% will be women, whereas only 11% of the engineers. So our samplee could be one of 27 engineers or 42 lawyers - we've already bumped Peng from .3 to .39! That he likes math puzzles easily takes Peng to over .4, meaning the answer can't be A).
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#7I'm afraid I don't quite understand the point of the second question. Does the answer mean to state authoritatively that that engineers are no more likely to do carpentry and partake in recreational mathematics than lawyers, or is there another explanation?
If it were changed to something like
"2. A team of psychologists performed personality tests on 100 professionals, of which 50 were engineers and 50 were nurses. Brief descriptions were written for each subject. The following is a sample of one of the resulting descriptions:"
"'Jack is a 45-year old man.'"
and if we were to assume that 80% of engineers are men, and that 80% of nurses are women, we'd expect 80% of the men to be engineers (and so expect Jack to be an engineer with 80% probability). Maybe?
Question 4 - the theatre ticket - could be worded more clearly. I thought "as you enter the theatre" meant "as you enter the big room with the stage and lots of chairs". Who would buy a ticket after entering that room, no matter what the circumstance?
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#8Despite the article's imputation that heuristics is a quick vs. accurate trade off, Gerd Gigerenzer's work show that in fact it is usually "quick AND more accurate" when used in the real, "large", world versus the "small" world of games and logical puzzles where all of the rules are known and knowledge of the problem is perfect, with infinite time allowed for optimization and calculation. The video here is well worth watching to counter-balance Kahneman's focus on edge cases where heuristic's break down or the wrong heuristic was applied.
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#9I didn't much like this: "being swayed by the way in which questions are worded rather than responding just to their substance" (for the lost ticket being allegedly equivalent to $10).
Is a ticket, which costs $10, emotionally equivalent to $10? Once bought, the ticket is unique in my eyes, whereas I'm not even sure how many $10 bills I have in my wallet even now. So if I lose one, well, maybe it wasn't there in the first place.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the impact of the ticket loss and the impact of loss of a $10 bill are not equivalent in terms of substance. Unless you're an economist.
Re: The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail
#10The engineer/lawyer problem explanation (spoilers) is only correct in a world where lawyers and engineers have all the same characteristics. That the sampled individual is a man will skew things all by itself. Of the lawyers, approximately 40% will be women, whereas only 11% of the engineers. So our samplee could be one of 27 engineers or 42 lawyers - we've already bumped Peng from .3 to .39! That he likes math puzzl…
They didn't do a good job representing that particular heuristic. Here's a better example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representativeness_heuristic#Th...
A better way to explain the common response to question #2 would be "quiz questions usually only give me information relavant to their answers" heuristic.