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Daniel Kahneman has died

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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#291

Post by resource_waste »

faeriechangling wrote: post #247
smcin wrote: post #234

Earlier 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.

>Which is to say in other words, most of the book probably replicates

This is extremely irresponsible.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#292

Post by kristianbrigman »

emeril wrote: post #85

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…

‘More likely’ to be true doesn’t imply they are the only two options. But pulling out these kinds of assumptions (that you heard that limit when it wasn’t explicitly there) is exactly the kinds of things they were trying to discover, partly to make sure to ask better questions.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#293

Post by kristianbrigman »

emeril wrote: post #108
istultus wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your (anyone's) system 1 might assume only two possible outcomes, but it's not in the question - it's which is more likely, and one option assuredly is, up to a less-than-or-equal sign.

I hope the actual study wasn't as "tricky" as it was referenced in the article re: the Linda example I'd imagine there's enough stuff Kahneman identified with biases that have held up and don't involve artificial questions like this designed to trick the respondents whose real world applicability seem questionable at best... further, in the supplied example, I'd argue that the prior probability of Linda being a femin…

It’s mathematically impossible for the set of things who have both properties X and Y, to be larger than the set of things that have property X.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#294

Post by dredmorbius »

PeterisP wrote: post #279
dredmorbius wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. int…

Yes, and I'd still argue that psychology's span of breadth is more encompassing. Note that I both studied economics at uni, and have spent considerable time since exploring both the history and current branches of the field. I'm rather familiar with it and my criticisms are rather based on that familiarity.

The relevant questions are:

1. Which field of study encompasses more elements, economics or psychology?

2. Are these fields intersecting, and if so, is one a proper subset of the other or not?

In a Venn diagram sense, how do the sets relate?

Psychology includes numerous branches, fields, divisions, and foci, of which choice determination is only a very small element. See for example:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/branches-of-psychology.html>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Major_schools_of_th...> (specifically schools of thought).

Contrast branches of economics. Numerous, but ... somewhat less expansive as compared with psychology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_economics#Branches_...>

Note that psychology, economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology all emerged out of what had previously been moral philsophy largely during the 19th century. Divisions and focus are somewhat arbitrary and strongly influenced by institutions and other pressures --- in the case of economics, political policy influences are notoriously strong, though other disciplines aren't immune from same. But if I had to matryoshka the two, I'd nest econ within psych.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#295

Post by kristianbrigman »

furyofantares wrote: post #282
adastra22 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that imply she is NOT a feminist? It just gives no information either way.

Because when you're talking to a real human that wants to hear your thoughts about Linda, it's much, much more likely that this is what they're asking and they didn't word it accurately.

That was the whole point of this particular episode… to highlight that ‘accurately’ involves hidden assumptions that you may or may not share with the listener. And then, try to identify if there is a systemic commonality in those hidden assumptions.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#296

Post by kirso »

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 believe same was the case for "Growth mindset"

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#297

Post by pkkm »

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.

> many of the results

My impression is that the priming chapter is bunk, but the rest has generally held up. Is that no longer true?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#298

Post by mistermann »

cornel_io wrote: post #262
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

Most human authors are frankly far too stupid to be worth reading, even if they do put care into their work. This, IMO, is the actual biggest problem with LLMs training on whatever the biggest text corpus us that's available: they don't account for the fact that not all text is equally worthy of next-token-predicting. This problem is completely solvable, almost trivially so, but I haven't seen anyone publicly describ…

> This problem is completely solvable, almost trivially so, but I haven't seen anyone publicly describe a (scaled, in production) solution yet.

Can you explain your solution?

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#299

Post by arpa »

tome wrote: post #275
arpa wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it is a positivistic science, i.e. it studies observable phenomena using the scientific method. The days of Freud and Jung where you could just smoke cigars and fart out ideas about collective unconsciousness and anal fixation are long over. Experiments are conducted, confounding variables controlled, and hypotheses (including H0) are tested. Granted, it's not as easy as in physics where you just drop a ball repeatedly and note down the results, buf it doesn't in any way make it a "softer" science. To equate psychology with self-help books is akin to equating LLMs with Markov chains.

Re: Daniel Kahneman has died

#300

Post by mikhailfranco »

smcin wrote: post #230
CuriouslyC wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that a lot of people read these books for the entertainment value of the anecdotes, and a lot of people enjoy feeling self-important for having read long books.

Not just self-important, but the anecdotes are designed to be bite-sized to be easily retellable, like the 2016 NYT Abraham Wald/ beware survivorship bias on graphing bulletholes on WWII airplanes viz which locations were more damaging. So you get a decade of "business nonfiction" bookstand fodder which is claims with high shock quality but often not relicable, mixed with anecdotes, to signal the reader's self-declar…

There was one Covid Zoom podcast (about economics?) with a middle-aged man sitting in front of a large set of bookshelves, housing row-upon-row of gnarly old books. The only recently-used book was lying flat on top of the other books.

Can you read the title?

https://pasteboard.co/imwZw8fcSpLy.png

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