Daniel Kahneman has died

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/27/daniel-kahneman-dead/

by mrjaeger • 2 years ago

1002 307 2 years ago

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

wow ..didn't realize he was so old .He was always on the tips of people's tongues, never seemed old or dated or faded away even at 90. He was at his peak intellectual influence or trajectory, which is uncommon for someone so old; most careers peak at 40-60. Not only that, his reputation fully unblemished and unmarred, which is also increasingly uncommon.

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

It's hard to think of any public intellectual whose career was on the peak of its trajectory as his was, and at such and advanced age. Usually someone has a few ideas and they fade with time, but not him. The neoclassical assumptions had crashed after 2008 and this guy comes along with his books and upends the whole economics establishment.

FabHK3• 2 years ago

The Chicago School was criticised not only by behavioural economists and psychologists, though, but also by other (fairly orthodox, eg New Keynesian) economists [0]. This is not to distract from Kahneman's monumental contributions (many together with Tversky, as narrated in the book The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis).

[0] see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.htm...

bwestergard• 2 years ago

Perhaps Stiglitz, who similarly undermined faith in core neoclassical assumptions?

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman

https://kahneman.scholar.princeton.edu/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/27/daniel-... | https://archive.today/tZY2w ("The Washington Post: Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-winning economist, dies at 90")

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/daniel-ka... | https://archive.today/MpDes ("Bloomberg: Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist Who Upended Economics, Dies at 90")

OliverJones• 2 years ago

Let us not forget his collaborator, Amos Tversky, who died young in 1996, and who certainly would have been a co-prize-winner had he lived.

zug_zug3• 2 years ago

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 of those chapters. If you don't have time for that, I'm sure chat GPT can give you a taste of the main premises and you can probe deeper from there.)

mistercow• 2 years ago

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.

zug_zug3• 2 years ago

Yeah I wouldn't read too much into any single study. But what I would defend vigorously is System1 / System2 distinction as something so clear/fundamental that you can see it constantly once you understand it.

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

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.

btilly5• 2 years ago

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.

cranium• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, Kahnman answered a post that scrutinized the effect of priming: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

coffeebeqn• 2 years ago

The general idea is very simple. Tactical vs strategic thinking are two different things and it’s good to be aware of that. I don’t know that that needs to be proven or disproven

sampo• 2 years ago

It’s worth noting that many of the results in Thinking, Fast and Slow didn’t hold up to replication.

Irony is, Kahneman had himself written a paper warning about generalizing from studies with small sample sizes:

"Suppose you have run an experiment on 20 subjects, and have obtained a significant re- sult which confirms your theory (z = 2.23, p < .05, two-tailed). You now have cause to run an additional group of 10 subjects. What do you think the probability is that the results will be significant, by a one-tailed test, separately for this group?"

"Apparently, most psychologists have an exaggerated belief in the likelihood of successfully replicating an obtained finding. The sources of such beliefs, and their consequences for the conduct of scientific inquiry, are what this paper is about."

Then 40 years later, he fell into the same trap. He became one of the "most psychologists".

http://stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/TverskyKahneman197...

yawboakye2• 2 years ago

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.

davetannenbaum• 2 years ago

His own work held up very well to replication. It's when he is citing the work of other scholars (in particular, that of social psychologists) that doesn't hold up well to replication.

canjobear• 2 years ago

“When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief . . . The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”

importantbrian• 2 years ago

This game is doubly valuable when the surprising result confirms one of your existing beliefs. I'm pretty good about doing this for surprising results that contradict a belief I hold, but I have to be extra disciplined about doing it when it confirms one of my beliefs.

acchow• 2 years ago

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, just that we cannot infer rational conclusions or predictions from it the same way we can from hard sciences.

Self help books are enormously helpful, but they're definitely not science either.

richrichie3• 2 years ago

Experiments involving grad students dont correlate well with how (normal) people behave in real life.

darby_eight• 2 years ago

I imagine this is just as fun to play with unsurprising results.

wslh• 2 years ago

It’s worth noting that many of the results in Thinking, Fast and Slow didn’t hold up to replication.

Beyond this specific issue, are psychology experiments and issues time and culture sensitive? I think so [1]

[1] https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/42104...

faeriechangling3• 2 years ago

“Many” is hyperbole, “Some” is more fair and his results stood up or the replication crisis better than most of his contemporaries.

yreg2• 2 years ago

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.

jongjong• 2 years ago

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.

kirso• 2 years ago

I believe same was the case for "Growth mindset"

pkkm• 2 years ago

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?

cvwright• 2 years ago

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.

voisin• 2 years ago

Because most nonfiction books are one, relatively small set of ideas (profound or not, novel or not) that could be concisely written as a few blog posts or a single long form article, but in order to monetize and build the author’s brand, get exaggerated into a full book. It is really painful and something I hope GPT will help the rest of us cut through in the future (“summarize the points. Dig into that point. What evidence is given? Etc etc etc” as a conversation rather than wasting 30 hours reading noise for a book)

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

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.

most non fiction could be well-summarized as a lengthy blog post

prionassembly• 2 years ago

Counterexample: Gilles Deleuze's "Empiricism and Subjectivity".

vundercind• 2 years ago

Mainly a business and self-help “airport book” problem. Sometimes pop-science.

1letterunixname4• 2 years ago

Perhaps nonfiction works could be ordered neatly such that the thesis and support material isn't buried, but arranged in a tiered detailed manner conducive to a "Choose Your Own Adventure"-like skipping of material. Short-form and long-form must find a way to coexist and be useful without critical compromise. It's not like everyone has or should need Cliff Notes or getAbstract.

dionidium• 2 years ago

I always think of this from Aaron Swartz:

But let’s say you can narrow it down to one good one, and you can find the time to read it. You plunk down an absurd $30 (of which, I’m told, less than $3 goes to the author) for a bulky hardcover and you quickly discover that the author doesn’t have all that much to say. But a book is a big thing, and they had to fill it all up, so the author padded it. There are several common techniques.
One is to repeat your point over and over, each time slightly differently. This is surprisingly popular. Writing a book on how code is law, an idea so simple it can fit in the book’s title? Just give example after example after example.
Another is to just fill the book with unnecessary detail. Arguing that the Bush administration is incompetent? Fill your book up with citation after citation. (Readers must love being hit over the head with evidence for a claim they’re already willing to believe.)
I have nothing against completeness, accuracy, or preciseness, but if you really want a broad audience to hear what you have to say, you’ve got to be short. Put the details, for the ten people who care about them, on your website. Then take the three pages you have left, and put them on your website too.

Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001229

BeFlatXIII3• 2 years ago

3rd third of the book: ??? I usually give up at this point

History of science books thankfully stave off that final third until at least 80%. However, their final chapter or two universally manages to be a letdown. It's either wild optimistic speculation, hype for a theory that's debunked 5 years after publication, or a focus that accidentally happened to predict the course of science post-publication. The story is told in a tonally jarring manner compared to the tight narrative in the rest of the book.

My #1 suspect for this disease is a desire to connect the content of the book to real life. Such attempts miss more often than they drive the point home, even if they're factually correct.

musiciangames• 2 years ago

As a sample of 1, it seems to me that this is particularly an issue with American non-fiction.

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

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.

ngc248• 2 years ago

Yes, most nonfiction books should be pamphlets instead of books.

robfitz• 2 years ago

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

dwighttk2• 2 years ago

It’s the only one of those books I still don’t regret telling people “it’s good” a decade later (with a couple caveats)

supafastcoder• 2 years ago

it covered some generally profound ideas that still are relevant as ever and not widely understood

I've tried to read this book over and over again to understand what everyone is talking about but never found the insights that useful in practice. Like, what have you been able to apply these insights too? What good is it to know that we have a slow mode of thinking and a fast way? Genuine question.

cjblomqvist2• 2 years ago

When to trust your instincts /intuition (eg. when few facts are known, there are no critical central deciding factors, but it's important to take a decision and move forward) and when to stop trusting your instincts and reflect a little (eg someone is trying to rush you into making a buying decision).

When it's likely that your biased, and try to work around that (highly related to above). (Eg. When don't make critical decisions when you're sleep deprived)

How you can utilize other people lacking this ability. (eg utilize it in sales processes)

brightball• 2 years ago

The Undoing Project is a solid read about his life and work too.

m463• 2 years ago

an interesting michael lewis book.

(lots less controversial than Going Infinite)

__mharrison__• 2 years ago

I guess I'm one of the rare folks who started reading TFAS and left without any big revelations or takeaways. I got bored half way through and stopped. Shrug...

pineaux• 2 years ago

Had the exact same experience. Maybe someone can enlighten us with why this is -supposedly- such a revelatory book?

bartread• 2 years ago

I know Daniel Kahneman only through reading him. Like you, I found Thinking Fast & Slow incredibly useful, first reading it perhaps 10 years ago. Definitely 2014, and I can't believe that's 10 years ago.

I must admit this headline shocked me for the simple reason that... I straight up had no idea that he was so old.

Thank you, Daniel, for the way you've influenced my (and our) thinking in ways that are still impacting us today, both in work and in the rest of life. Rest in peace.

1letterunixname4• 2 years ago

More meta is that, when people in aggregate are stressed and not all that wise or informed, they tend to look for convenience and expediency rather than effort and mastery. Unfortunately, this can also happen when people are apathetic or not stressed and slack off on reasonable skepticism or fail to dig into the details.

Leadership, pride, excellence, empathy, and fairness must not fail into the decay of jingoist buzzwords and remain values with intent and actions that remain unwavering.

The greatest danger is dishonesty when words stop having ordinary meanings, when people stop talking to each other, or when they're a lack of agreement on the obvious intersection of a shared reality.

AlgoRitmo• 2 years ago

I have a physical copy and only read about 2 chapters, after having it for years. I need to take it on a flight to finally get around to reading it. It seems like one of those books you have to own and read at least once.

meinersbur• 2 years ago

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?

TedHerman2• 2 years ago

Some questions along these lines are not so easy. For example, iterated versions that take bankruptcy into account (game over) by using geometric mean instead of arithmetic mean; but that might not always be the optimal strategy [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.68.10.2493].

cainxinth• 2 years ago

If you don't have time for that, I'm sure chat GPT can give you a taste of the main premises and you can probe deeper from there.

From gpt4:

The Two Systems: Kahneman introduces the concept of two distinct systems that govern our thoughts. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Heuristics and Biases: The book explains how the fast, intuitive thinking of System 1 leads to the use of heuristics—a kind of mental shortcut that facilitates quick judgments but can also lead to systematic biases and errors in thinking. Kahneman discusses several of these biases, such as the availability heuristic, where people judge the probability of events by how easily examples come to mind, and the anchoring effect, where people rely too heavily on the first piece of information they encounter.

Overconfidence: One of the themes of the book is the confidence people place in their own beliefs and judgments. Kahneman shows that people tend to overestimate their knowledge and their ability to predict outcomes, leading to a greater confidence in their judgments than is warranted. This overconfidence can contribute to risky decision-making and failure to consider alternative viewpoints.

Prospect Theory: Kahneman, along with Amos Tversky, developed Prospect Theory, which challenges the classical economic theory that humans are rational actors who always make decisions in their best interest. Prospect Theory suggests that people value gains and losses differently, leading to decisions that can seem illogical or irrational. It highlights the asymmetry between the perception of gains and losses, where losses are felt more acutely than gains are enjoyed.

Happiness and Well-being: The book also delves into the determinants of happiness and well-being, distinguishing between the experiencing self (which lives in the present) and the remembering self (which keeps score and makes decisions). Kahneman explores how our happiness is influenced more by how life events are remembered than by the actual experience. This leads to some counterintuitive findings, such as people being happier with experiences that end on a high note, regardless of the overall quality or duration of the experience.

Grustaf• 2 years ago

To me the general idea felt as trite and blindingly obvious as any book by Taleb or Gladwell, and about as self-congratulatory. The only thing that surprised me was that he picked the singularly unmemorable names "System 1" and "System 2", instead of something like "intuition" and "reason".

John23832• 2 years ago

Wow. I was just looking him up yesterday to see if he had written anything else. Sad. Be blessed.

jarcoal• 2 years ago

Damn, I’m reading Thinking Fast and Slow right now. RIP.

zebomon• 2 years ago

Thinking 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!

misiti3780• 2 years ago

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.

FabHK3• 2 years ago

I don't recall any suggestion of foul play with Kahneman/Tversky, unlike Ariely.

lupire4• 2 years ago

Ariely has rained Kahneman's reputation because the average person doesn't distinguish "pop behavioral scientist".

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

"people [are] endlessly complicated and interesting."

yodon• 2 years ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39840447

dredmorbius8• 2 years ago

FYI, that's been redirected to this post: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841183>

micah94• 2 years ago

I remember years ago Penn Jillette talking about his book "Thinking Fast and Slow". And I was like why is a magician talking about a book written by an economist?? Well, read it and you'll understand why it fits so well with their brand of magic. Dr. Kahneman expresses in words what's going on in your brain while watching someone like them perform.

astrodust• 2 years ago

There's a lot of "magic" in that book where your pre-conceptions are completely subverted.

bumby3• 2 years ago

FWIW, I believe Kahneman resisted being categorized as an economist and preferred to think of himself as a psychologist.

dredmorbius8• 2 years ago

There's a school of thought which holds that economics is a subset of psychology.

I'd thought that this was reflected in some university departmental organisation, with M.I.T. being the one that came to mind. Despite there being a behavioural economics section there, though, so far as I'm aware Economics remains its own department.

Kahneman's training and primary focus were both in psychology, but he was awarded the somewhat problematic Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Multi-discipliniarity is in fact A Thing.

Princeton bio:

Daniel Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.... He has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2002), the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013).

<https://kahneman.scholar.princeton.edu/>

fastandslow4• 2 years ago

Fantastic book - I certainly had to read it slowly, not fast.

Two things bothered me about it though - firstly, it landed shortly before the reproducibility issues of such research became more widely known.

Secondly - towards the end of the book, it espouses the idea that using some methods of psychlogical and behavoural manipulation is at worst a net neutral, especially if there was nothing to see of the manipluation in question. After all, who can argue against organ donation being opt-out by default, or similar?

To me, this is like a magician claiming that there was no sleight of hand, as we were free to look wherever we liked during their performance. Denying the presence and capabailities of tools of manipulation is, in my opinion, incredibly dangerous, and the worst of its outcomes has been very publicly played out in recent years.

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve, as they used to say in the pie factory where I worked. But the belly knows. Yes, it's a dangerous, cavalier idea. But from an endlessly complicated and interesting thinker.

Retric3• 2 years ago

some methods of psychlogical and behavoural manipulation

I think you may be objecting to the idea of manipulation here rather than his point. Influence is not necessarily bad, if a dentist notices some poster which causes his patients to floss more shouldn't he keep it up?

Suggesting all manipulation is bad implies we shouldn't do public health education etc if it happens to be effective.

fastandslow4• 2 years ago

But it never stops at "this thing we want to encourage is obviously good with absolutely no downsides".

After all, floss is a single-use plastic, generally made of PTFE, the production of which requires all sorts of nasty forever chemicals.

fastandslow4• 2 years ago

Fantastic book - I certainly had to read it slowly, not fast.

Two things bothered me about it though - firstly, it landed shortly before the reproducibility issues of such research became more widely known.

roguecoder• 2 years ago

I think the argument is whether or not we admit we are having these effects and take responsibility for them, we are doing them.

I personally find that telling people exactly what I intend to do makes it more effective rather than less. But in a field where we can change people's behavior by making a button orange instead of blue or presenting a form in one page vs three, I find it impossible to pretend that one of those is a neutral choice.

Instead, I focus on what it is we are maximizing for, and how people feel about the experience. I push my companies to choose patterns that help people feel secure & in control, leading to predictable outcomes that align with what they actually expressed wanting. It means we are collaborating with our users, even though we could have used those same techniques to make them feel more anxious, spend more money than they intended, or buy things they didn't actually need.

dinp• 2 years ago

The idea of system 1 and system 2 had a profound impact on me. While specific conclusions in the book were reported to be based on low quality data, it doesn't take away from the fact that it gave me a new mental lens to look at things and understand people's behaviour.

Swizec• 2 years ago

If you’ve only read Thinking Fast And Slow, try grabbing a copy of his 2021 book Noise. It’s a little drier but I found it to be a much deeper and more insightful read. Less pop sci, more hard research results.

And if I recall correctly he addresses the replication issues from Thinking Fast And Slow and discusses more recent research that disproves or adds nuance on the older studies. I think it’s also more practically useful and applicable to everyday life. Where TFS gives you a “these are interesting facts about life” vibe, Noise is more “here’s the problem and this is what you can do about it” style.

_aleph2c_• 2 years ago

https://archive.md/tZY2w

suriyaG• 2 years ago

kahneman 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 reponds in the comment sections to a very critical piece about his work.

FabHK3• 2 years ago

Sad that Tversky, despite being younger, predeceased him by nearly 3 decades.

abirch2• 2 years ago

Don't forget "Noise" it was a great read and great bridge between "Thinking Fast and Slow" with "Nudge"

UncleMeat2• 2 years ago

Nudge is based on a significant amount of messy science and smuggled policy preferences. It has also not really borne out via the policy initiatives started based on its concepts.

richrichie3• 2 years ago

Does behavioral economics offer an alternative theory with useful predictions? Like, do we have an option pricing model that holds up better than models coming out of standard theory?

DrFalkyn2• 2 years ago

Those option pricing models (mostly) work because everyone uses them. Because (almost) everyone is convinced they work.

Convince everyone to use a different model and it will work.

quanto• 2 years ago

Kahneman's reply was burried deep inside the comment section. Reproduced below for others' convenience:

> I [Kahneman] accept the basic conclusions of this blog. To be clear, I do so (1) without expressing an opinion about the statistical techniques it employed and (2) without stating an opinion about the validity and replicability of the individual studies I cited.

What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. As pointed out in the blog, and earlier by Andrew Gelman, there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. We also cited Overall (1969) for showing “that the prevalence of studies deficient in statistical power is not only wasteful but actually pernicious: it results in a large proportion of invalid rejections of the null hypothesis among published results.” Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message.

My position when I wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was that if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. But the argument only holds when all relevant results are published.

I knew, of course, that the results of priming studies were based on small samples, that the effect sizes were perhaps implausibly large, and that no single study was conclusive on its own. What impressed me was the unanimity and coherence of the results reported by many laboratories. I concluded that priming effects are easy for skilled experimenters to induce, and that they are robust. However, I now understand that my reasoning was flawed and that I should have known better. Unanimity of underpowered studies provides compelling evidence for the existence of a severe file-drawer problem (and/or p-hacking). The argument is inescapable: Studies that are underpowered for the detection of plausible effects must occasionally return non-significant results even when the research hypothesis is true – the absence of these results is evidence that something is amiss in the published record. Furthermore, the existence of a substantial file-drawer effect undermines the two main tools that psychologists use to accumulate evidence for a broad hypotheses: meta-analysis and conceptual replication. Clearly, the experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it. This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through. When questions were later raised about the robustness of priming results I hoped that the authors of this research would rally to bolster their case by stronger evidence, but this did not happen.

I still believe that actions can be primed, sometimes even by stimuli of which the person is unaware. There is adequate evidence for all the building blocks: semantic priming, significant processing of stimuli that are not consciously perceived, and ideo-motor activation. I see no reason to draw a sharp line between the priming of thoughts and the priming of actions. A case can therefore be made for priming on this indirect evidence. But I have changed my views about the size of behavioral priming effects – they cannot be as large and as robust as my chapter suggested.

I am still attached to every study that I cited, and have not unbelieved them, to use Daniel Gilbert’s phrase. I would be happy to see each of them replicated in a large sample. The lesson I have learned, however, is that authors who review a field should be wary of using memorable results of underpowered studies as evidence for their claims.

COGlory2• 2 years ago

I'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.

mgfist2• 2 years ago

Nassim Taleb's opinion of others shouldn't hold much sway - the man is a prick.

zengid• 2 years ago

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.

COGlory2• 2 years ago

He has an incredible ego, but also seems very self aware.

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

Taleb really has a high opinion only of himself. A very smart man, but also very self-absorbed.

malshe• 2 years ago

I know I am nitpicking but Kahneman was not an economist. He was a cognitive psychologist. In fact he is the only psychologist ever to win a Nobel prize in economics.

dr_kiszonka2• 2 years ago

Just to add some context, there is no Noble Prize in psychology.

FergusArgyll• 2 years ago

Great interview Tyler Cowen did with him.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daniel-kahneman/

rasse• 2 years ago

He truly had that rare combination of gifts for formulating and expressing ideas clearly.

kqr• 2 years ago

Among all the praise for Thinking, Fast and Slow it seems that many people have missed out on Noise. Also a fantastic book that shaped how I approach situations perhaps more than the former.

Kahneman was one of those people where I was just waiting to have a problem tough enough that I'd have a good reason to email him with a question, whether or not I'd get a response. I guess no longer.

mgfist2• 2 years ago

Feel like I'm the only one who couldn't get through Thinking, Fast and Slow. Felt like a rambling slog, with most of the interesting bits being something that was very common sense to me.

arrowsmith4• 2 years ago

I had the same reaction tbh. I managed to get to the end, but it was a slow, tedious slog. And maybe it's because I'd already read a lot of other pop-psych books, but I barely felt like I learned anything new from it.

That aside, I don't doubt that Kahneman was a brilliant mind, and I'm saddened by his passing. RIP.

xutopia• 2 years ago

When did you read the book? It seems to me that the ideas within the book now pervade culture in ways that it didn't when it first came out. If you read it recently it could contribute to your feeling of this being common sense. Also because this idea feels like common sense doesn't mean that it was. Evolution is common sense now but it was a revolutionary way to think of species when On The Origin Of Species came out.

vik03• 2 years ago

Yup, exactly this

yodsanklai• 2 years ago

I couldn't finish this book. It felt like a never-ending stream of examples to illustrate a few simple ideas.

passion__desire• 2 years ago

I remember one quick reply of Kahneman when Sam and Daniel were discussing about intuitions and how people are wrong many times.

Sam Harris jokes, "I have met these people". Daniel replies, "We have met them and we see them in mirror" [0]

[0] 17:25 @ https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/150...

Shrezzing• 2 years ago

Kahneman'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.

kolbe• 2 years ago

Out of both humility and reality, I think even Kahneman would give the bulk of the credit to Amos Tversky.

worik4• 2 years ago

The subject was becoming a fairly absurd and dogmatically prescriptivist practice

That was when I was studying it!

So much rubbish "economics is a science because it uses maths" is one favourite of mine.

I did over a decade of study on economics and finance and nobody, even once, mentioned Karl Marx, arguably the most influential economist in the last two hundred years.

It was very prone to fetishes. "Price mechanism" was one I recall. Every problem in society had to be shoe horned into a market so the "price mechanism" would get to work.

dougSF70• 2 years ago

He was nudged off his mortal coil too soon.

graphe• 2 years ago

His life is filled with tragedy, like his father dying in Vichy France and his wife preceding his death. Imagine living forever where everyone you know and love dying before you.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

The death of reason.

sonorous_sub• 2 years ago

I always felt I got more mileage out of the reflexivity of Popper, by way of Soros.

mattpavelle• 2 years ago

For those who don't know who he is:

Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky, a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making.

ipsum2• 2 years ago

All of this is in the article.

radu_floricica• 2 years ago

"advance" and "groundbreaking work" is far from enough. Those two basically invented a couple of new sciences.

"Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" is the paper that made them famous, and it's still a damn good read:

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyK...

narnarpapadaddy• 2 years ago

Yes, two new sciences. To those criticizing his work: I’m not saying the magnitude of the impact is the same, but have all of Darwin’s ideas about evolution stood the test of time? Clearly not.

Each of us sees the world through our own sets of biases. None of us is immune. Any of us that can see clearly enough to move humanity’s body of knowledge forward even a smidgen is a rarity and a treasure. Even among that group this man (and his collaborators) did more than most. I don’t believe _I_ will be counted among those. I can’t fault Kahneman for making some mistakes. Finding and fixing those is part of the process, and requires others with a different set of perspectives and biases. At a future date, weighed against his contributions, I believe they will appear relatively small.

whyenot• 2 years ago

I used to play D&D after school with Tal Tversky and Jon Barwise at the Tversky's Eichler home on the Stanford campus. This was in the early 1980s. I had no idea how famous either of my friend's fathers were (or would become). It's sad how young both of their parents were when they died.

randombetch• 2 years ago

He's a legend! His book made me question my every thought for a while D:

coyotespike• 2 years ago

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.

mxs6• 2 years ago

I was fortunate enough to take a cognitive psych grad seminar from him in the 90s, co-taught by his wife, Anne Treisman. He always seemed given to thinking a little more deeply in the moment than most people do.

One half-joking comment he made about science in the real world vs some idealized notion of it has always stuck with me. In a discussion about whether the results of some paper conflicted with some model or theory of cognition, he mused that scientific progress in psychology (and other non-hard sciences) was really about embarrassing rivals with competing models. No high-level model was ever stated precisely enough to rule out some particular finding; you could always tweak your theory a little to accommodate it. It's just that at some point, you might be too embarrassed to do so.

rvbissell• 2 years ago

Let's call those tweaks epi(stemological)-cycles.

trash_cat2• 2 years ago

I did a Cog Sci bachelor and this is the conclusion I made I finished my studies. A lot of Thinking Fast and Slow are summaries of research done in the field over decades. In particular, biases and intuition as internalized knowledge/expertise. Sure you can complain about replication issues but this is the best model when it comes to minds that I know of.

ignoramous• 2 years ago

He always seemed given to thinking a little more deeply in the moment than most people do.

"As soon as you present a problem to me, I have some ready-made answer. Those ready-made answers get in the way of clear thinking, and we can’t help but have them." – Daniel Kahneman

resource_waste3• 2 years ago

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.

Tarq0n• 2 years ago

There's lots of scientists that deflect and deny falsifications.

elbear2• 2 years ago

Embarrassed because science worked as expected?

YeBanKo• 2 years ago

Do you have resources on what specific results did not hold up?

tmalsburg2• 2 years ago

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

kashyapc• 2 years ago

Careful there. By saying "many of the results", you're hand-waving most of the book. The book covers over several decades of his collaborative research with Amos Tversky.

Most of the "underpowered studies" are in the priming-related chapter, called "The Assoviative Machine". The rest of the book is still worth a careful read.

(I had to make this same correction here several years ago. I didn't look up the comment to link it here.)

emeril2• 2 years ago

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 are only two possible outcomes, wouldn't a better question include a third option of "not a bank teller and may or may not be a active feminist"?

istultus• 2 years ago

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.

emeril2• 2 years ago

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 feminist (based on her being an activist/etc.) is probably higher than her not being a feminist so, in a sense the respondents got it right (i.e., in that population, I'd argue there are more women who are bank tellers and feminists than just bank tellers)...

lupire4• 2 years ago

Yes. You've noticed that most psychological insights and paradoxes are actually linguistic ambiguities. But it's more fun to ignore that.

richrichie3• 2 years ago

Wittgenstein says hello!

Unlisted6446• 2 years ago

This aspect was investigated in the literature and broadly speaking, the biases still pop-up: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00350

- It was also touched on in the original paper that Tversky and Kahneman put out https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-03110-001

billfor• 2 years ago

I read that as assuming that the "bank teller only" answer implied that the person was not a feminist, since most people would assume that being a bank teller does not make you a feminist. In any case, a bad phrasing to give for a survey.... These questions would be better off being as unambiguous as possible.

adastra223• 2 years ago

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

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

"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.

kristianbrigman3• 2 years ago

‘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.

kabigon• 2 years ago

Can we ban paywalled WP articles?

cynicalpeace• 2 years ago

Fascinating 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."

mugivarra69• 2 years ago

rip

aj_nikhil• 2 years ago

R.I.P a true genius.. hope people discover him now..

orsenthil• 2 years ago

Rest in Peace, Ms. Kahneman. May strength be with your family and loved ones. Your Thinking Fast and Slow was an influential book.

UIUC_06• 2 years ago

Kahneman was a giant among men. Anyone rattling on about "the replication crisis" probably isn't fit to carry his folders.

ashton314• 2 years ago

For me the best part about reading Thinking: Fast and Slow is that I'm more distrustful of my own thought processes. That little bit of questioning of my own conclusions has helped me see gaps in my reasoning.

My dream is to one day have the caliber of insights this man had, along with his ability to express them so clearly and persuasively.

dang, does this deserve a black bar?

AceyMan• 2 years ago

as an owner of my softbound copy of TF&S I was surprised there wasn't one here already. (I saw the WSJ article drop the minute it posted, as a subscriber.) RIP, Prof. K.

vik03• 2 years ago

May he rest in peace

amai• 2 years ago

About his book: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...

deadbabe• 2 years ago

90 years old, the most common age of death these days.

roughly• 2 years ago

I'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.org/p/books/the-extended-mind-the-power-of-... . It's hard to put anything at the level of Thinking Fast and Slow, but it felt like reading a sequel to that book.

ivoflipse• 2 years ago

Learned Optimism has a similar style of explaining the author's work over many years in an accessible manner

tonymet2• 2 years ago

Lots of praise for this man. He was obviously very influential. His theory enabled the broad paternalistic state we are all suffering from today. Too many policy makers read his book and thought they could tax every person into "good" behavior. That's way beyond the scope of how governments should be involved.

Now that "soft paternalism" has been so successful, the same policymakers are pivoting into hard paternalism .

I learned a lot from Thinking Fast and Slow, but it's also a cynical book. In the same vein as Skinner's behavioralist view of people.

Principles must always come first.

ls6122• 2 years ago

“Should” matters little in politics and war. What works for power will be done regardless of your morals. This is how the world works.

tonymet2• 2 years ago

not all men think like this

7thaccount• 2 years ago

This is one reason why I feel like economics is still in its infancy and I find a lot of policy recommendations are built off ideology rather than actual reality. That doesn't stop people from being very confident though about their statements.

I understand that sometimes you need assumptions to make the math work, but the fact that it took so long for behavioral economics and bounded rationality to be recognized is crazy. Just because the math is convenient doesn't mean people work that way at all.

I say this as someone who has taken a lot of econ classes, so I understand its value, but it is still very much a set of principles and ways of thinking about problems involving people, rather than something as exact as it's made out to be.

I got slightly off topic here, but seeing as how Daniel got the nobel prize in 2011 (pretty recent) and the work occurred in the 70s, it made me think again about how young the field is.

jcutrell• 2 years ago

I have a standing offer to buy any individual any of Kahneman's books, if they commit to me they will read it. Amazingly only a few people have taken me up on this.

Kahneman is unequivocally the person I would call my hero, today I am sad to see him leave us. I hope to honor his memory by... I guess, recognizing just how wrong I am, on a regular basis.

profsummergig• 2 years ago

Kahneman's "add one" / "add three" exercise is his recommended way to activate System 2.

If anyone has figured out how to do it using one's phone, please share. There used to be an App on Google Play store but it doesn't work on more recent versions of Android. I created a Spreadsheet based random 4-digit number prompter, which isn't bad, but I'd like better ideas if anyone has any.

arduanika3• 2 years ago

One of a kind! A life that will never be replicated.

dorianmariefr• 2 years ago

is it me or the washington post making money off obituaries kinda weird?

arduanika3• 2 years ago

Only insofar as it's "kinda weird" to run a service where you notice interesting new things that happen in the world, and then write professional, mostly-reliable words about them, to share with your general audience.

In past centuries, this was a fairly common business model, but I understand the concept sounds pretty jarring to modern ears.

mehdix• 2 years ago

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.

1_over_n• 2 years ago

I 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.

jonesn112• 2 years ago

NO NO NO NO NO !

eimrine• 2 years ago

Is Daniel Kahneman the only Psychologist who has received the Noble?

kwar13• 2 years ago

I met him while I was studying at Berkeley. Not only he helped upend the long-held notion of "rational economics", he was also a great person to meet!

jonesn112• 2 years ago

The best psychologist of all time has died. RIP

TedHerman2• 2 years ago

I first became aware of a type of "slow thinking" through the book "Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less", by Guy Claxton, published 1999. Does anyone have a comparison of the types of slow thinking?

topologie• 2 years ago

Met the man in person, had a really long chat with him. Made me realize how he truly was one of the smartest people alive at the time.

Really sad news...

jonnycosgrove• 2 years ago

Fantastic impact, probing society to think, about their thinking. RIP.

Daniel Kahneman has died

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