For me, among other things, Thinking, Fast, and Slow cracked the implicit notion that my intuition is always right by demonstrating how easily it could go wrong.
RIP Daniel Kahneman.
Daniel Kahneman has died
251–260 of 324 posts
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#252I'd second every recommendation in this thread for "Thinking Fast And Slow" - it's one of those books that gives you a concept that has such immediate salience that it feels like it unlocks some part of reality you didn't see before but is totally obvious in retrospect. 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…
Learned Optimism has a similar style of explaining the author's work over many years in an accessible manner
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
>was always refreshingly open and honest about that, His work got torn to shreds with science, what did you expect him to do? It really should be embarrassing rather than acceptable. It doesnt matter how honest you are AFTER you are caught. Between the replication crisis and his name on some bad papers, the guy seriously didn't care about correctness as much as interesting-faux-science.
Embarrassed because science worked as expected?
The justice system works as expected if thieves get caught stealing, I'd still be pretty embarrassed if I was the thief. Science may still sort of work, a lot of scientists sure don't.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs if the best that can be said about a person with his reputation, and about the process overall, that the system managed to catch his low quality output decades down the line.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that Gladwell comes off as trying to be scientific, when really he's just a persuasive storyteller. If you view Gladwell as a purveyor of facts or a science communicator, then he does a horrible job and yes, it's hard to trust whatever he presents because he's at best not very careful about his facts and conclusions. In that case, why would you ever pay attention to him? On the other hand if you see Gl…
The problem with "take it or leave it, it's just a story" is that stories are not neutral, or cost-free. Memes compete for attention/proliferation/survival, and false-but-appealing memes outcompete true-but-boring memes. It's a mini DDOS attack on our collective bandwidth to be churning out durable falsehoods disguised as scientific insight.
Thank you for this comment - you have succinctly captured something that I have been feeling but unable to express in words.
Stories/memes/narratives are the most easy/potent form of mental ingestion - so much so that I think humans cannot ingest facts or ideas at all, only stories. And this puts a collective responsibility on all of us to be very careful about the stories we create.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#255I'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.
Well there's a reason for that - consider it a form of spaced-repetition learning.
The author's goal is to convey an idea to the reader. He breaks it up into small overlapping chunks and gradually doles out these small overlapping chunks over the course of the book, sometimes backtracking and repeating an idea with a different example, all accompanied by a compelling narrative.
If he does his job well then the reader doesn't notice that spaced-repetition learning is happening because the supporting examples are entertaining enough to continue reading. In the worst case, the author gets the exact criticism that you are leveling.
Honestly, if you had Mathematics books written like Thinking, Fast and Slow or Freakonomics you'd have a lot more students passing calculus.[1]
So, here's a challenge for you - in your area of expertise (whatever that is), write down the chapters of a hypothetical book you would write to explain one or two foundational principles to an outsider (to that area). It's pretty hard to do. Then compare with best-selling non-fiction aimed at outsiders like Freakonomics, etc.
I did this (chapter overview thing) and realised pretty quickly that I had planned a really boring book.
[1] I read Thinking, Fast and Slow around 2011, and I read The Mom Test last year. Almost all of the sub-themes of the former is still in my memory. The only thing I remember of The Mom Test is that people will lie to you to protect your feelings.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#256from 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…
"Which is more likely" isn't a question that commonly has three options. It's a question that commonly has only two options, one of which is more likely than the other.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#257I wrote Daniel an email once from a personal (non-academic) account once as I felt like there was something meaningful to discuss, though I didn't expect a response. He did indeed reply, and seemed remarkably down to earth and genuine considering he was something of a rockstar in pop-sci/psych. RIP.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 present…
Which is to say in other words, most of the book probably replicates, particularly the parts based on Kahneman’s own work, and for the parts that don’t you can just skip the chapters or take them with a grain of salt. Kahneman to me always struck me as the one eyed king of the replication crisis. Yes he fucked up but he fucked up notably less than his contemporaries and most of his work is still readable.
Without a copy of the book, I don't remember which parts were based on Kahneman’s own work, and I don't see that we can/should just skip the other chapters.
R-index guys said [0]: "Table 1 shows the number of results that were available and the R-Index for chapters that mentioned empirical results."
Chapters where estimated R-index Chapters where estimated R-index > 50: Ch 5,8,9,12,17,24
Chapters that don't cite empirical results (by Kahneman, or who?): 1,2,10,13,15,18-23, all of 25-38
As to the chapters that had empirical results, and had an estimated R-index > 50: scores of 55, 57, 60, 62 are really scraping by; saying that means they "probably replicate" is setting the bar really low, even quoting Tversky and Kahneman (1971) back at themselves. (The R-index guys say "Even some of the studies with a high R-Index seem questionable with the hindsight of 2020.")
As to whether he was the one-eyed king of the replication crisis, he certainly started speaking out in 2012 [3] after the social priming scandal broke; did insiders have suspicions about non-replicability before that and should people have pushed back more, earlier? The fallout from the Francesca Gino and Ariely scandals continues.
[0]: https://i0.wp.com/replicationindex.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
[1]: Chapter listing: https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/8467452/TOC
[2]: Chapter summaries by Conor Dewey: https://www.conordewey.com/blog/every-chapter-of-thinking-fa...
[3]: Nature (2012) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11535
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#259[deleted]
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#260I'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.
Yes, most nonfiction books should be pamphlets instead of books.