3 ms·

It was featured in "Thinking Fast and Slow", and those authors seem quite academically rigorous.

by orasis 11y ago

SonicSoul 11y ago
that's an appeal to authority, sounds like @kens actually tried to verify this story. I'd be curious to hear more examples as well. I believe I heard something similar on You're Not So Smart podcast but that might have referenced the same example
- soperj 11y ago
  I do think the example is bullshit, simply because you could throw ONE very thick pot and have it weight more than 50 pounds. Of course it's a horrible pot and you wouldn't get any better since you only made one piece, but it would get you an A since it would use more clay. Total # of pieces thrown would make more sense than pounds of clay used.
  - diab0lic 11y ago
    Forgive me if I've missed something but the original comment says the group that threw the most clay scored higher on creativity, not scored higher on pounds of clay thrown.
    - soperj 11y ago
      Guess you missed something. "The second group was graded on only the total number of pounds of clay they threw."
  - coverband 11y ago
    (Not that I think the anecdote is real, but) that's the idea -- the parable was about how the pot with the best quality was found in the 'quantity' team even though this wasn't their objective.
tripzilch 11y ago
Yes they're very good at "seeming" the part. Until you check the cites/references. Please excuse me for lumping Kahneman, Tversky and Taleb into the same bin (stating beforehand, feel free to dismiss or form your own opinions because of this). My justification is they cite eachother all the time, write about the same topics and are quoted as doing their research by "bouncing ideas off each other" (only to later dig up surveys or concoct experiments to confirm these--psych & social sciences should take some cues from psi research and do pre-registration). This is now the second time I notice that one of their anecdotes posed as "research" doesn't quite check out to be as juicy and clear-cut (or even describing the same thing) as the citation given. The other one was the first random cite I checked in Taleb's Black Swan. A statistics puzzle about big and a smaller hospital and the number of baby boys born in them on a specific day. The claim being research (from a metastudy by Kahneman & Tversky) showing a large pct of professional statisticians getting the answer to this puzzle wrong. Which is quite hard to believe because the puzzle isn't very tricky at all. Checking the cited publication (and the actual survey it meta'd about), turns out it was a much harder statistical question, and it wasn't professional statisticians but psychologists at a conference getting the answer wrong. Good thing I already finished the book before checking the cite. I was so put off by this finding, I didn't bother to check anything else (most papers I read are on computational science, where this kind of fudging of details is neither worth it, nor easy to get away with). Which is too bad because the topics they write about are very interesting, and worthwhile/important areas of research. I still believe it's not unlikely that a lot of their ideas do in fact hold kernels of truth, but I'm fairly sure that also a number of them really do not. And their field of research would be stronger for it to figure out which is which. Unfortunately this is not always the case for the juicy anecdotes that sell pop-sci / pop-psych books.
- orasis 11y ago
  This is very interesting, thank you. Modern non-fiction is so frustrating.
- ves 11y ago
  You should read silent risk (currently freely available as a draft on talebs website). It's mathematical, with solid proofs and derivations, so it doesn't really suffer from the same problems as The Black Swan. I had basically the same issues with the Black Swan that you did.

It was featured in "Thinking Fast and Slow", and those authors seem quite academically rigorous.

by orasis 11y ago

It was featured in "Thinking Fast and Slow", and those authors seem quite academically rigorous.

that's an appeal to authority, sounds like @kens actually tried to verify this story. I'd be curious to hear more examples as well. I believe I heard something similar on You're Not So Smart podcast but that might have referenced the same example

soperj 11y ago
I do think the example is bullshit, simply because you could throw ONE very thick pot and have it weight more than 50 pounds. Of course it's a horrible pot and you wouldn't get any better since you only made one piece, but it would get you an A since it would use more clay. Total # of pieces thrown would make more sense than pounds of clay used.
- diab0lic 11y ago
  Forgive me if I've missed something but the original comment says the group that threw the most clay scored higher on creativity, not scored higher on pounds of clay thrown.
  - soperj 11y ago
    Guess you missed something. "The second group was graded on only the total number of pounds of clay they threw."
- coverband 11y ago
  (Not that I think the anecdote is real, but) that's the idea -- the parable was about how the pot with the best quality was found in the 'quantity' team even though this wasn't their objective.

tripzilch 11y ago

Yes they're very good at "seeming" the part. Until you check the cites/references. Please excuse me for lumping Kahneman, Tversky and Taleb into the same bin (stating beforehand, feel free to dismiss or form your own opinions because of this). My justification is they cite eachother all the time, write about the same topics and are quoted as doing their research by "bouncing ideas off each other" (only to later dig up surveys or concoct experiments to confirm these--psych & social sciences should take some cues from psi research and do pre-registration). This is now the second time I notice that one of their anecdotes posed as "research" doesn't quite check out to be as juicy and clear-cut (or even describing the same thing) as the citation given. The other one was the first random cite I checked in Taleb's Black Swan. A statistics puzzle about big and a smaller hospital and the number of baby boys born in them on a specific day. The claim being research (from a metastudy by Kahneman & Tversky) showing a large pct of professional statisticians getting the answer to this puzzle wrong. Which is quite hard to believe because the puzzle isn't very tricky at all. Checking the cited publication (and the actual survey it meta'd about), turns out it was a much harder statistical question, and it wasn't professional statisticians but psychologists at a conference getting the answer wrong. Good thing I already finished the book before checking the cite. I was so put off by this finding, I didn't bother to check anything else (most papers I read are on computational science, where this kind of fudging of details is neither worth it, nor easy to get away with). Which is too bad because the topics they write about are very interesting, and worthwhile/important areas of research. I still believe it's not unlikely that a lot of their ideas do in fact hold kernels of truth, but I'm fairly sure that also a number of them really do not. And their field of research would be stronger for it to figure out which is which. Unfortunately this is not always the case for the juicy anecdotes that sell pop-sci / pop-psych books.

orasis 11y ago
This is very interesting, thank you. Modern non-fiction is so frustrating.
ves 11y ago
You should read silent risk (currently freely available as a draft on talebs website). It's mathematical, with solid proofs and derivations, so it doesn't really suffer from the same problems as The Black Swan. I had basically the same issues with the Black Swan that you did.