Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Daniel Kahneman has died

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 324 posts

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#231

Post by smcin »

owisd wrote: post #58
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…

You can just leverage the “second brain” crowd — for every vaguely well-known non-fiction book someone has written up a summary for themselves and posted it on their blog.

Sure, but be sure to check they're vaguely objective, not just shills, compensated reviewers or affiliates.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#232

Post by smcin »

chx wrote: post #64
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…

[flagged]

No, the less cynical take is it says "the second half of the book drags on and you can skip most of those chapters." Which has been generically true of much business nonfiction for decades now. How people choose to apply that knowledge predates AI: skipping it, reading any of the summary reviews available, listening to the audiobook while in gym/car/shopping, asking a friend, dipping into it selectively, etc. There are lots of low-tech alternatives.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#233

Post by wslh »

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.

> It’s worth noting that many of the results in Thinking, Fast and Slow didn’t hold up to replication.

Beyond this specific issue, are psychology experiments and issues time and culture sensitive? I think so [1]

[1] https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/42104...

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#234

Post by smcin »

trash_cat wrote: post #196
resource_waste wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you be specific what ideas of his aren't scientific? It's true that science requires replication but he deals with models but perhaps uses bad studies to support it. It's like saying he should replicate the theory of evolution.

If you google "Which Kahneman claims were wrong", here are the first two of 4.97m hits"

https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/kahneman-and-tversky-re...

https://replicationindex.com/category/thinking-fast-and-slow...

> "Table 1 shows the number of results that were available and the R-Index for chapters that mentioned empirical results. The chapters vary dramatically in terms of the number of studies that are presented (Table 1). The number of results ranges from 2 for chapters 14 and 16 to 55 for Chapter 5. For small sets of studies, the R-Index may not be very reliable, but it is all we have unless we do a careful analysis of each effect and replication studies.

> Chapter 4 is the priming chapter that we carefully analyzed (Schimmack, Heene, & Kesavan, 2017). Table 1 shows that Chapter 4 is the worst chapter with an R-Index of 19. An R-Index below 50 implies that there is a less than 50% chance that a result will replicate. Tversky and Kahneman (1971) themselves warned against studies that provide so little evidence for a hypothesis. A 50% probability of answering multiple choice questions correctly is also used to fail students. So, we decided to give chapters with an R-Index below 50 a failing grade. Other chapters with failing grades are Chapter 3, 6, 7, 11, 14, 16. Chapter 24 has the highest highest score (80, which is an A- in the Canadian grading scheme), but there are only 8 results.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#235

Post by arduanika »

raincole wrote: post #126
lupire wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been called "emotion / intuition" and "logic" for centuries or millennia before the goofy System name was invented.

Ironically people like System 1/2 more than intuition/logic because the terms sound more like they are coined by System 2.

At least, they sound that way to your System 1!

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#236

Post by xotesos »

pineaux wrote: post #157
__mharrison__ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm one of the rare folks who started reading TFAS and left without any big revelations or takeaways. I got bored half way through and stopped. Shrug...

Had the exact same experience. Maybe someone can enlighten us with why this is -supposedly- such a revelatory book?

It certainly has interesting ideas in small doses but knowing about your heuristics and biases doesn't mean you still don't fall victim to them.

The real issue I have with the book is the audio book is read in such boring way by Patrick Egan. I would love to hear a different voice actor take a shot at it as it is not the most exciting book on its own anyway. Then read in such a boring way it reminds me of the worst of college classes I took.

I also don't think it is the type of book that was ever meant to gain the popularity it has. It isn't even that easy to find Judgment Under Uncertainty by clicking on Kahneman's name on Amazon. Kahneman and Tversky wrote that 30 years before Thinking Fast and Slow and it is a great book.

Because of its popularity I would say Thinking, Fast and Slow might be the most overrated book I can think of.

A big reason for that is I would say it is the greatest marketing of a book I can think of by Random House given the subject and how dry the book is.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#238

Post by dredmorbius »

tomrod wrote: post #160
dredmorbius wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all human behaviour mercantile? The counterargument to the proposition in my earlier post would be to show that there is economic activity which relies on nonhuman behaviours. Automated financial trading or AI-based management systems (financial, corporate, industrial, governmental, etc.) might be possible exceptions, which raises further interesting questions.

Economics since the mid 1900s hasn't been solely focused on mercantilism, but rather has had a significant focus on choice under various conditions, assumptions, and constraints. Game theory, mechanism design, contract and auction deisgn, and focus on individual versus collective behavior (e.g Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) have strong overlap with psychology. Though there is certainly daylight: my subfields of Indus…

Mercantile != mercantilism.

The thrust of my pithy question was whether or not the principle subjects of economics --- of human production, consumption, and exchange --- where the sum total of all psychological inquiry.

I suspect not.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#239

Post by dredmorbius »

adastra22 wrote: post #223
dredmorbius wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a school of thought which holds that economics is a subset of psychology. I'd thought that this was reflected in some university departmental organisation, with M.I.T. being the one that came to mind. Despite there being a behavioural economics section there, though, so far as I'm aware Economics remains its own department. Kahneman's training and primary focus were both in psychology, but he was awarded the…

Psychology is the study of the behavior of singular minds. Economics is the study the behavior of many minds acting independently.

Group psychologists have entered the chat.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=psychology+of+groups>

https://opened.tesu.edu/introsocialpsychology/chapter/the-ps...>

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=psychology%20of%20group...>

Post reply on HN