Can we ban paywalled WP articles?
Daniel Kahneman has died
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Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#92from 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…
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.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And then the most outlandish of these are picked up by popular science writers. Who proceed to mangle it beyond recognition, and add a random spin. This then goes to the general public. Some believe the resulting garbage. And wind up with weird ideas. Others use that garbage to justify throwing out everything that scientists say. And then double down on random conspiracy theories, denialism, and pseudoscience. I wish…
The scientists push it on the pop writers, to created a Personal Brand and an industrial complex around their pet theory.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#94Fascinating quote I found on his wikipedia page:
"It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others – the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting."
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#95from 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…
Yes. You've noticed that most psychological insights and paradoxes are actually linguistic ambiguities. But it's more fun to ignore that.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#96Kahneman's impact on economics can't be understated. The subject was becoming a fairly absurd and dogmatically prescriptivist practice before Kahneman stirred it up along with a a relatively small number of colleagues. To a large extent, it's still dogmatic and prescriptivist, but unorthodox opinions (not just limited to behavioral economics) are more accepted & considered following Kahneman's input.
Out of both humility and reality, I think even Kahneman would give the bulk of the credit to Amos Tversky.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#97I'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.
psychology isn’t science. it’s a grave mistake to read/interpret it a such. does that mean it’s useless? of course not: some of the findings (and i use findings very loosely) help us adjust our prior probabilities. if we’re right in the end, we were lucky. otherwise we just weren’t.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#98I'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.
I thought he was so witty and refreshing when I read AntiFragile (which I will always regard as a masterpiece), but I feel like he's ran out of ideas now and is just complaining about people he doesn't like.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#99Thinking 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.
Ariely has rained Kahneman's reputation because the average person doesn't distinguish "pop behavioral scientist".
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#100rip