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Daniel Kahneman has died

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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#201

Post by knightoffaith »

yawboakye wrote: post #117
andrelaszlo wrote: post #105

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?

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…

Is it not scientific to say that X property is true of human behavior more often that it is not with statistical significance?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#202

Post by yodsanklai »

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.

I couldn't finish this book. It felt like a never-ending stream of examples to illustrate a few simple ideas.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#203

Post by pigeons »

freedomben wrote: post #104
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."

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.

I thought the OP was joking!

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#204

Post by idontpost »

btilly wrote: post #66
ethanbond wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

[dead]

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#205

Post by localhost »

iancmceachern wrote: post #200
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."

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

Then don't copy and paste your copy of Thinking Fast and Slow into your AI along with my prompt then?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#206

Post by Yodel0914 »

paulpauper wrote: post #50
cvwright wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

There's a quote I love from someone I can't remember:

> Most books should be blog posts. Most blog posts should be tweets. Most tweets shouldn't exit.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#207

Post by iancmceachern »

localhost wrote: post #205
iancmceachern wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then don't copy and paste your copy of Thinking Fast and Slow into your AI along with my prompt then?

(My comment was less about my behavior but an attempt to encourage others to evaluate my thinking in hopes that they may apply it to their own in order to benefit our collective understanding)

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#208

Post by boulos »

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.

That isn't what that blog post is saying.

It's saying that the author's invented metric may indicate that the studies within each chapter may not replicate. No actual replication studies were done to produce the table in that post.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#209

Post by sn9 »

yawboakye wrote: post #117
andrelaszlo wrote: post #105

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?

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…

There's nothing about the scientific method that requires the process to output tidy little laws to be deserving of being called science.

Some fields are quite lucky that the universe is so elegantly organized, but for that isn't true for the overwhelming majority of fields with as many degrees of freedom as biological systems and anything more complex.

That doesn't mean we can't conduct experiments that reproduce.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#210

Post by darby_eight »

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.

I imagine this is just as fun to play with unsurprising results.
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