Great interview Tyler Cowen did with him.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daniel-kahneman/
Daniel Kahneman has died
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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#32[deleted]
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#33I'm not an economist nor that interested in them, but I did read Nassim Taleb's books* and Kahneman stuck out as one of very few economists Taleb doesn't totally trash. * I had read Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance" and was then recommended Taleb's books for a more thorough perspective on probability, to apply to Koonin's work.
Nassim Taleb's opinion of others shouldn't hold much sway - the man is a prick.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#34I'm not an economist nor that interested in them, but I did read Nassim Taleb's books* and Kahneman stuck out as one of very few economists Taleb doesn't totally trash. * I had read Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance" and was then recommended Taleb's books for a more thorough perspective on probability, to apply to Koonin's work.
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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#35kahneman was such a fascinating personality. Other than "Thinking fast and slow", I highly recommend "The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis about Kahneman and Tversky's incredible journey changing the standard economic theory. Some interesting talks with Daniel Kahneman - https://www.edge.org/adversarial-collaboration-daniel-kahnem... - https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-... Kahneman himself…
Sad that Tversky, despite being younger, predeceased him by nearly 3 decades.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#36I'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.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#37[flagged]
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it's better to have a lot of small hits or a few big hits and many misses in regard to replication. If the studies which have the greatest implications replicate, then maybe many misses is not that bad.
That's an interesting theoretical question. Unfortunately the reality is that the more interesting and quotable the result is, the less likely it is to replicate. So replication problems most strongly hit things that seem like they should have the greatest implications. Kind of a "worst of all worlds" scenario.
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.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#39Thinking Fast and Slow made a tremendous impact on me when I read it (multiple times) in the 2010s. What curiosity and what clarity of thought this man had. His influence will continue to be felt!
Me too, I think a bunch of it was found to be reproducible though. https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... Same thing is happening w/ a lot of the work of Dan Ariely, but I think his situation is much worse.
I don't recall any suggestion of foul play with Kahneman/Tversky, unlike Ariely.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#40Earlier 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.
What's wild to me is that anyone could read chapter 4 and not look up the original papers in disbelief.
Long before the controversy was public I was reading that book and, despite claims that the reader must believe the findings, it sounded like nonsense to me. So I looked up the original paper to see what the experiment set up was, and it was unquestionably a ridiculous conclusion to draw from a deeply flawed experiment.
I still never understood how that chapter got through without anyone else having the same reaction I did.