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Daniel Kahneman has died

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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#271

Post by Ma8ee »

kmacdough wrote: post #68
mistermann wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fun question especially considering the topic of the thread : are propositions that lack proof necessarily false?

No, but propositions with strong counter-evidence generally are, which is the main topic here. "Not-repicable" generally means "attempted to replicate, but got results inconsistent with the original conclusion."

That is not my understanding of what “not replicable” means. My understanding is “attempted to replicate, but didn’t get any significant results supporting the original conclusion”. There’s nothing that says that the new results are inconsistent with the original findings, only that they couldn’t find any support for them in a similar study.

And that could be for a number of reasons. Of course, sometimes the results are just wrong, due to statistical flukes, or too creative data cleaning and analysis. Often the results might just be much more limited than what the original study claims: Maybe the results of a psychological study is valid for MIT students in the beginning of the semester, before lunch, but not for Yale students in the early afternoon. In this case the only mistake would have been to assume the results were universal.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#273

Post by arrowsmith »

1letterunixname wrote: post #164
arrowsmith wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go further: many non-fiction books could be losslessly compressed into a tweet. (Looking at you, The Checklist Manifesto )

HAHAHA. :@D Challenge accepted. The right checklist organizes uniformity, success, and safety in almost every human endeavor. - @SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs

I'd go further:

"Use checklists." - @AtulGawande

There, now you don't need to read the book.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#274

Post by tmalsburg2 »

coyotespike wrote: post #83

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.

Wouldn’t the best thing have been to retract the book, or at least to published a revised edition?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#275

Post by tome »

arpa wrote: post #264
acchow wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

you have no idea what "psychology" is, do you?

I have a similar point of view as acchow, so it's possible I don't understand psychology either. Could you enlighten us about what it actually is?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#276

Post by yreg »

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.

This is unfortunately the case for many books on human behavior. Sure, Dan Ariely comes to mind, but the field itself is very tricky.

I don't think we - people used to STEM - appreciate how difficult behavioral psychology is. In STEM, we are used to isolating experiments down, so there are as few variables as possible. And we are used to well-designed experiments being reproducible if everyone does what they are supposed to do right.

In the study of human behavior there are always countless uncontrollable variables, every human is a bit different and it is very difficult to discover something that would apply generally. Also, pretty much all of the research is done on western population of European descent.

This is why I take all behavioral claims with a large grain of salt, but I still have respect for the researchers doing their best in the field.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#277

Post by jongjong »

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 so weird that the stuff about priming was supposedly debunked, yet if you look around at what happened to society over the past few years, I've been blown away by how suggestible and controllable people are.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#278

Post by robfitz »

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.

It's all about that value-per-word ;)

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#279

Post by PeterisP »

dredmorbius wrote: post #238
tomrod wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As the parent post tried to substantiate, for current economics the principle subjects really are not limited to human production, consumption and exchange, but also include subfields that focus on all choices that humans make - things like revealed preferences vs expressed preferences or risk aversion are a focus of economics, but they apply to consumption just as well as for other choices people make about e.g. intimate relations or choice of hobbies or music.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#280

Post by meinersbur »

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…

Kahneman's book was praised a lot, but I found it more questionable than useful.

It has its good parts, like elaborating on System 1 and System 2, but my favorite concept was regression to the mean. It might by obvious in some cases, but the book made me realize that it applies nearly everywhere.

The bad parts include priming (e.g. the Florida effect) that like others mentioned could not be replicated. He sometimes praises himself for even trivial observations. But my biggest grime that he dismisses Bernoulli's hypothesis in favor of his loss aversion (I still think humans apply a mix of both), while also framing loss aversion as irrational. That is, humans should always only maximize the expected outcome (in terms of money). The reasoning is that during life we will encounter a continuous stream of decisions and maximizing the expected value in each decision will (according to the law of large numbers) maximize the overall income.

It's not (always) irrational. Imagine you have a million dollars. Someone offers you a gamble of a fair coin flip between gaining 2 million dollars and paying one million dollars. With a million USD on your bank account you had a quite comfortable life, and it could get more comfortable with 3 million on your account. But if you lose you are ruined. According to Kahnemann you should take that gamble. Also consider that before the invention of money, those decisions were typically whether to hunt that mammoth or something less aggressive.

The German version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" has a particularity: Your win jumps from € 125.000 to € 500.000 at the 14th question (A consequence of conversion from Deutsche Mark to Euros). Assume you have no idea what the answer is. According to Kahneman you should always pick one at random. If you pick right you get € 500.000. If you pick wrong you will still win € 32.000 or € 500 if you took the 4th lifeline like most contestants do. This makes an expected win of 3/4500 + 1/4500.000 = € 125.375, compared to € 125.000 when you don't answer. Would you do it?

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