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Daniel Kahneman has died

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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#171

Post by usrnm »

ghaff wrote: post #137
freedomben wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 vari…

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

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#172

Post by roguecoder »

fastandslow wrote: post #17

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 manipluatio…

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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#173

Post by Nurw »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #40
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.

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 experi…

Haha, yeah, I am reading the book these days, and I clearly remember thinking that those effects seemed really exaggerated.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#174

Post by acchow »

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.

> 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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#175

Post by stevage »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #149
localhost wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

"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"

Didn't George say it is such an allegory?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#176

Post by Systemling0815 »

acchow wrote: post #174
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.

> 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, j…

[dead]

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#177

Post by BeFlatXIII »

cvwright wrote: post #36
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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#178

Post by kbenson »

foobiekr wrote: post #125
PheonixPharts wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experi…

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.

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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#179

Post by BeFlatXIII »

mattmaroon wrote: post #168
olvy0 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 go…

> 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.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#180

Post by tgv »

btilly wrote: post #22
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.

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.

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.
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