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Daniel Kahneman has died

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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#101

Post by CuriouslyC »

olvy0 wrote: post #73
voisin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 thes…

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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#102

Post by xutopia »

mgfist wrote: post #47

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.

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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#103

Post by supafastcoder »

zug_zug wrote: post #6

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…

> 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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#104

Post by freedomben »

localhost wrote: post #61
btilly wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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."

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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#105

Post by andrelaszlo »

yawboakye wrote: post #97
mistercow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#106

Post by [deleted] »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #94

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…

[deleted]

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#107

Post by whyenot »

mattpavelle wrote: post #65

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 h…

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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#108

Post by emeril »

istultus wrote: post #92
emeril wrote: post #85

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…

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.

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)...

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#109

Post by Unlisted6446 »

emeril wrote: post #85

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…

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

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#110

Post by davetannenbaum »

mistercow wrote: post #13
zug_zug wrote: post #6

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…

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.

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.
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