191–200 of 324 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just to add some context, there is no Noble Prize in psychology.
Established in 1968
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 t…
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…
Yes. You've noticed that most psychological insights and paradoxes are actually linguistic ambiguities. But it's more fun to ignore that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Embarrassed because science worked as expected?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> How do you define science? Science is that which could be disproved. It is a very small, and very important, part of human knowledge.
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.)
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.
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…
> 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.
After all, floss is a single-use plastic, generally made of PTFE, the production of which requires all sorts of nasty forever chemicals.
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."