12 ms·

Re-reading Kahneman's “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

214 points by primodemus 10y ago

teh_klev 10y ago
Perhaps not a great idea to copy the all-caps title verbatim. Fairly certain de-capping this title wouldn't break the rules of editorialising titles.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Re-reading Kahneman's thinking fast and slow and LOUD
  - haddr 10y ago
    Listen all the people! I'm RE-READING! PS. See the comment above about the css styles. Probably it's some browser dependent handling of small caps
- roddux 10y ago
  You just caused me to discover something interesting-- the title is only uppercase due to a CSS transform rule. When I copy the text in Firefox, it copies case-correctly. Chrome copies it as all uppercase. I think OP uses Chrome :^)
  - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
    amazing all the ways in which privacy can leak
dharmon 10y ago
I wish the author had provided some references, because his claims are conflicting with what I have read from many other sources. I am mainly thinking of a) many forms of priming are firmly established at this point, and b) Kahneman specifically called out researchers to more thoroughly vet their findings for the others. This conflicts with this article's claims that priming is not established, and that Kahneman has doubled-down on it. I suspect the confusion comes from the many forms of priming, some of which are established, others of which are suspect.
- gone35 10y ago
  I suspect the confusion comes from the many forms of priming, some of which are established, others of which are suspect. Not an expert, but I thought it was by now common knowledge that social priming is a field in crisis, where failure to replicate is the norm, not the exception[1,2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [2] http://chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/ http://chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/
repsilat 10y ago
>> You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. > I am surprised at the blind spot I had when first reading it – Kahneman’s overconfidence didn’t register with me. Wow, this hits me pretty hard too. My impression of the book was of Kahneman being a subtle and humble thinker, in stark contrast to the bombast of Nassim Taleb of "The Black Swan". A great post, if only for this and drawing my attention to the fact that the "hot hand" effect may actually exist... I've definitely used it as an example of when people are liable to see patterns in the noise :-(
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Kahneman is half-right, though. You have to accept the conclusion of a study as true. You can't accept the study as true and then keep believing in the thing the study just disproved. What you can do, though, is question whether the study itself is true. Sometimes, it's not.
  - jknoepfler 10y ago
    One can consistently accept a study as well-implemented/operationalized while acknowledging a reasonable chance that the results are garbage, and that repeating the study might not yield significant results.The proper conclusion of a statistically oriented study is a probability distribution across several potentially contradictory propositions. One is never forced to "exclude the middle" as a result of a study, and conclude either A or not A. Re-reading what you said I think we're in agreement already. I was nit-picking at the idea that a study has a single conclusion which is either true or not true. The conclusion of most studies is properly a vector and a hefty pinch of salt imo. edit: clarity
  - freshhawk 10y ago
    Actually I would say that you are more likely to be correct if you wait until there are multiple replicated results before you "have to accept" it as true. One study is interesting evidence, depending on the protocol, but publication bias/filedrawer effect is a real thing and studies are massively biased towards positive results.
  - 10y ago
ninjakeyboard 10y ago
"later research has questioned whether the belief is indeed a fallacy.[1][2] More recent studies using modern statistical analysis have shown that there is evidence for the "hot hand" and that in fact it may not be a fallacy.[2]"
manish_gill 10y ago
100% agreed. For all the hype around the book, and so many people recommending it as the best book they've read in $duration, I could never quiet stomach so many of Kahneman's "X Study leads to Conclusion Y" in the book. I still liked the distinguishing characteristics between the "Fast" and "Slow" brains (the 2 systems) that Kahneman uses (Which I think he borrowed from another researcher, whose name skips me). It's a great way to think about how the brain works and you can neatly categorise some things as part of System A and some as System B. But the behavioural science studies leave much to be desired. Then again, perhaps that is the uncertain nature of behavioural science?
freshhawk 10y ago
Ah, now this is gratifying to see. I'm not a lone crazy person. Because I read that book, with high expectations, a couple years ago and came away profoundly disappointed for many of the same reasons. I did find him to be a hell of an interesting thinker and someone with very interesting ideas, but to me, the whole book had a smell of overconfidence and incredibly weak standards of evidence. Very much in the "well I observed this phenomena, went for a walk and though deeply and clearly the reasons is X", followed by a tower of (interesting) conjecture built on top of X. I put it down to coming from the economics culture rather than a more rigorous scientific culture.
- jldugger 10y ago
  It's a science book; the standards of evidence are lower and often rely upon credentials. If you want rigorous science, go to the peer reviewed literature: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=kahneman&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C38&as_sdtp= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=kahneman&btnG=&as... Note that Kahneman is a psychologist, though he is affiliated with behaviorial economics.
  - Retric 10y ago
    I don't think it quite met even that low standard.
  - internaut 10y ago
    I read affiliated as afflicted. This sometimes happens to me. It's like Freudian slips for your mind.
- 31reasons 10y ago
  I guess we are victims of Halo Effect as he described in the book! He won the nobel prize so we think whatever he writes must be true. Weak standards of evidence also made me bit uneasy throughout. But my System 1 just trusted the whole book because everyone seems to be liking it. Case of Social Proof i guess.
  - deleted 10y ago
RodericDay 10y ago
Yeah, I started reading this and got a very strong "Steven Pinker" vibe from it. Except I pushed back a lot more against Pinker's assertions than Kahneman's.
- kobayashi 10y ago
  I've never read a critique of Pinker, and found his article on academic prose to be quite well-written. Would you expand upon your "Steven Pinker vibe"?
  - RodericDay 10y ago
    There's multiple, none definitive (the cool thing about writing a giant tome is that somebody has to write a giant tome back). I've just picked up on them as I discuss his work online on various venues, which I feel panders very obviously to well-off westerners seeking reassurance. Here's r/AskHistorians describing his laughable characterization of the An Lushan rebellion (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/svsej/what_do_historians_think_of_steven_pinkers_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/svsej/what_d...) There's another that dismantles his use of an ancient human corpse found carrying "weapons" to suggest that there had been a murder. Yet another discusses sloppy research where me mis-portrays some joke minor journal as representative of an academic field and makes broad generalizations based on it. One day I'll collect my own compendium. In the meantime, if you're curious, just scour reddit or something.
wrp 10y ago
A few years ago, I was looking for a semi-popular book I could recommend to people on dual systems theory. I picked up Kahneman's TFS expecting it to be a good choice, but was very disappointed. His logic was sloppy and bombastic, but what I found most irritating was that he would constantly, like maybe every other page, slightly misrepresent other people's work. -------------------------- Dual systems theories hold that reasoning, categorization, and decisionmaking are the result of two interacting systems, one rule-based/symbolic and the other statistical/associative. The deliberative (Type 2) process is open to introspection but the intuitive (Type 1) is not. Which system dominates varies by situation. Intuitive reasoning dominates when there is low time or interest. It can also dominate deliberative reasoning when the cost of violating intuition appears large. The general model of interaction between the systems is that intuition and affect operate through positive feedback and the deliberative system attempts to inhibit the intuitive with varying success depending on relative coherence. While a weak form of this theory is still largely accepted as useful, there is much criticism based on the difficulty of cleanly isolating the processes. The theory seems to be fading in popularity in favor of multimodularity. The main counter-theory seems to be that deliberative reasoning is mainly cycles of intuitive process.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  What about What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Stanovich [1], is it better? [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300164629 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300164629
tootie 10y ago
I see the author's point and I feel it too (I'm only 2/3 through the book) but unless he has evidence to show that Kahneman used flawed research, then he is just replacing this baseless optimism with baseless pessimism. The book definitely gives a lot of overly confident and pat answers to complex questions, but the book is aimed at a mass market who are trying to grasp the basics of decision theory and are not going to read the sources.
jonahx 10y ago
How is it possible that it took until 2015 to discover the mistake in the original 1985 research (Gilovich et al.) "proving" that hot hands in basketball don't exist? It became mainstream news, discussed in places like ESPN and has been repeated countless times in popular science books. Furthermore, the debunking in the Miller and Sanjurjo article referenced in the parent's blog post is not the result of arcane mathematical analysis, but uses extremely basic math that any undergraduate could understand. It's almost shockingly hard to believe that no one noticed the problem before, when the result was the subject of such passionate, widespread controversy, and so many people had the tools to see the flaw.... And not only that, the edge case condition makes the flaw painfully obvious. From the Miller and Sanjurjo article's description of the original, flawed research: "...a streak is typically defined as a shot taken after 3, 4, 5, . . . hits". Looking at only the case of a shot taken after streaks of length 3, the miss rate is 100% (because a hit would imply the streak actually had length 4).
- im3w1l 10y ago
  Maybe the people who noticed decided to keep quiet, and make money off of it.
- afarrell 10y ago
  Usually when the popular press talk about a study, they don't link to the original study. So the number of people who talk about it is much higher than the number of people who might actually go and re-examine the study.
dwightgunning 10y ago
So, say I'm about 15% into Thinking Fast and Slow, and struggling a little with the pace/density, should I keep going with it? I'm generally interested in the topic but just got side tracked from the book and haven't picked it up in a couple months.
- deeteecee 10y ago
  im in the last section and honestly, looking back at it, i would've been satisfied with just reading the first 2 sections, maybe even the 3rd one. It gets more dense and narrower as you go through it I think. one thing drivin me crazy is about half the time Kahneman presents a situation and says "you would've chosen this" except that I didn't choose that. Guess I'm a weird outlier or something :P
  - tome 10y ago
    > one thing drivin me crazy is about half the time Kahneman presents a situation and says "you would've chosen this" except that I didn't choose that. Guess I'm a weird outlier or something :P Oh wow, I had that experience! Thanks for putting my feeling into words.
WalterBright 10y ago
My most useful takeaway from the book is how cognitive biases negatively influence one's investment returns. I've been applying this to my own investment strategy, trying to avoid those biases.
- ersii 10y ago
  Have you had any successes or failure while trying to apply that to your investing strategies so far? Any particular cognitive bias you're focusing on mitigating?
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    I struggle with the loss aversion bias. Because even in a good year I've done worse than the indices, I've swallowed my pride and shifted much further towards buy-and-hold in indexes. It's only been a year, so no really valid results yet. A successful strategy I've used for a long time is to hold my winners instead of selling them to "lock in" the profits.
dcw303 10y ago
I found this a very frustrating read as well. The tone of the book was over-confident and in my mind the author really goes to no attempt to explain his reasoning. I only made it as far as the probability section. I gave up after failing to understand his logic. Something about students enrolled in computer science, if Google is indicative.
- blagswod 10y ago
  Interesting, that's the chapter that caused me to finally put the book down. The gist of it was: people not thoroughly trained in statistics aren't good at it. This is hardly news. In fact, even highly intelligent people struggle with the Monty Hall problem, for instance.
jamesrom 10y ago
So his problem is that Kahneman was confident before the replication crisis? We should not fault a person for trusting studies and science published in countless journals.
whack 10y ago
I think there are 2 subtle distinctions to be made, in how evidence should be interpreted and responded to. A) Given XYZ evidence, I am 100% confident that premise ABC is true. B) Given XYZ evidence, I am 100% confident that accepting premise ABC as true, is the right thing to do. Sentence A is almost always false. No matter how much supporting evidence you have, the odds of the underlying premise being true, is never 100%. There is always some likelihood of all the evidence being flawed/biased/compromised in some way. Because of this, the likelihood of the underlying premise being true, is always lower than 100%. That said, even if the odds of the premise being true is only 90%, sentence B could still be true. That sentence doesn't state that the premise is guaranteed to be true. Only that given what we know, accepting the premise is the most rational thing to do. Just like deciding not to buy a lottery ticket, or doubling down on your bet when you're holding a straight flush. You might still turn out to be wrong, but that doesn't negate the fact that your earlier actions were 100% the right thing to do. Unfortunately, despite the significant differences between A and B, a casual reader may still mistake B for A. A non-perfectionist writer/editor may also mistakenly write A, when really, he means B. This might be the case with Kahneman's book. Given the evidence available at the time of his writing, the B interpretation of his assertions would still hold up well, and we shouldn't be denying that on the basis of 20/20 hindsight.
- nkurz 10y ago
  I like your distinction, and think there is an important difference to be made between A and B. But I don't think you've framed B quite correctly. For example, what would be the difference between "I am confident" and "I am 100% confident"? What would be the case for B in which having exactly 65% confidence would be correct? I think both A and B have an unspoken assumption of "and assuming there is no error in our measurement of XYZ, and assuming that XYZ means what we think it means, and assuming there is no other evidence we are failing to consider". Unless one's confidence in these assumptions (and probably some others) is 100%, one shouldn't have complete confidence in any particular course of action.
dschiptsov 10y ago
The big idea is to realize, internalize beyond any doubt that the brain is evolved set of highly specialized structures, some very ancient, some more recent, which communicate to each other. The emotional and instinctive parts are more fundamental and more important than language-related parts, and what we call or reflect as thinking is mostly feeling and sensing, to which verbal augmentation is merely a, well... augmentation.) The message is that cortex is by no means is everything or even most essential. The ancient, animal, non-verbal parts of the brain are still doing most of the job. As a consequence the popular myth about human's pure rationality should be discarded. We are still animals. The crucial difference is obviously a language and hence abstract thinking (in that order - we think in language labels we attach to everything, including feeling and moods). But this is not the whole picture. So called Fast Thinking is working of the ancient, animal parts of the brain.
arjun1296 10y ago
It is obvious, he has studied intuitive biases throughout his career. However, he himself said that experts make only little difference as compared to the market experts in the stock market. On an analogy, he is an expert but just like any other human. He is fallible. Our bias on the Oscar Winning - Halo Effect biased us in buying and reading. And after reading and analyzing the content. Now everything has gone to the hindsight. That is the purpose, concrete analysis of concrete condition based on rationality.
alankay1 10y ago
I was quite disappointed in this book -- having followed Kahneman since his early research with pupillometry as an indication of interest. I agree with many of the comments in this thread. Given the author -- and the importance of the subject -- it just should have been done better. But I still recommend that it be looked at for a variety of reasons, including what Kahneman calls the "expository fictions" of "System 1" and "System 2". (In talks I usually pair this up with a slide of "Maps of the Mind" by Turner to make the point that there are many characterizations of mental architectures, some at odds and some harmonious (i.e. be careful when trying to reason with such suppositions). Still, the "System 1" and "System 2" simplifications are very useful as aids to thinking about many important areas, including learning, user interface design, etc.
woodandsteel 10y ago
Kahneman's book may have a lot of dubious science for specific points. However, you need to remember that he was attacking the Economic Man model that has been standard in economic science for over a century. This model holds our economic decisions are all rational, or at least if biased, the biases are random across different people and so cancel out. That means we should always trust the unregulated market to produce ideal results, and so the government should always stay out of it, as it could only make things worse. Various economists such as Robert Schiller and his writings on "animal spirits" have argued that this is not at all the case. Kaheneman and the other behavioral economists have added a lot of empirical support, and, with some luck, economic science will shift to better fit reality.

214 points by primodemus 10y ago

Perhaps not a great idea to copy the all-caps title verbatim. Fairly certain de-capping this title wouldn't break the rules of editorialising titles.

nerdponx 10y ago
Re-reading Kahneman's thinking fast and slow and LOUD
- haddr 10y ago
  Listen all the people! I'm RE-READING! PS. See the comment above about the css styles. Probably it's some browser dependent handling of small caps
roddux 10y ago
You just caused me to discover something interesting-- the title is only uppercase due to a CSS transform rule. When I copy the text in Firefox, it copies case-correctly. Chrome copies it as all uppercase. I think OP uses Chrome :^)
- thesimpsons1022 10y ago
  amazing all the ways in which privacy can leak

dharmon 10y ago

I wish the author had provided some references, because his claims are conflicting with what I have read from many other sources. I am mainly thinking of a) many forms of priming are firmly established at this point, and b) Kahneman specifically called out researchers to more thoroughly vet their findings for the others. This conflicts with this article's claims that priming is not established, and that Kahneman has doubled-down on it. I suspect the confusion comes from the many forms of priming, some of which are established, others of which are suspect.

gone35 10y ago
I suspect the confusion comes from the many forms of priming, some of which are established, others of which are suspect. Not an expert, but I thought it was by now common knowledge that social priming is a field in crisis, where failure to replicate is the norm, not the exception[1,2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [2] http://chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/ http://chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/

repsilat 10y ago

>> You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. > I am surprised at the blind spot I had when first reading it – Kahneman’s overconfidence didn’t register with me. Wow, this hits me pretty hard too. My impression of the book was of Kahneman being a subtle and humble thinker, in stark contrast to the bombast of Nassim Taleb of "The Black Swan". A great post, if only for this and drawing my attention to the fact that the "hot hand" effect may actually exist... I've definitely used it as an example of when people are liable to see patterns in the noise :-(

StavrosK 10y ago
Kahneman is half-right, though. You have to accept the conclusion of a study as true. You can't accept the study as true and then keep believing in the thing the study just disproved. What you can do, though, is question whether the study itself is true. Sometimes, it's not.
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  One can consistently accept a study as well-implemented/operationalized while acknowledging a reasonable chance that the results are garbage, and that repeating the study might not yield significant results.The proper conclusion of a statistically oriented study is a probability distribution across several potentially contradictory propositions. One is never forced to "exclude the middle" as a result of a study, and conclude either A or not A. Re-reading what you said I think we're in agreement already. I was nit-picking at the idea that a study has a single conclusion which is either true or not true. The conclusion of most studies is properly a vector and a hefty pinch of salt imo. edit: clarity
- freshhawk 10y ago
  Actually I would say that you are more likely to be correct if you wait until there are multiple replicated results before you "have to accept" it as true. One study is interesting evidence, depending on the protocol, but publication bias/filedrawer effect is a real thing and studies are massively biased towards positive results.
- 10y ago

ninjakeyboard 10y ago

"later research has questioned whether the belief is indeed a fallacy.[1][2] More recent studies using modern statistical analysis have shown that there is evidence for the "hot hand" and that in fact it may not be a fallacy.[2]"

manish_gill 10y ago

100% agreed. For all the hype around the book, and so many people recommending it as the best book they've read in $duration, I could never quiet stomach so many of Kahneman's "X Study leads to Conclusion Y" in the book. I still liked the distinguishing characteristics between the "Fast" and "Slow" brains (the 2 systems) that Kahneman uses (Which I think he borrowed from another researcher, whose name skips me). It's a great way to think about how the brain works and you can neatly categorise some things as part of System A and some as System B. But the behavioural science studies leave much to be desired. Then again, perhaps that is the uncertain nature of behavioural science?

freshhawk 10y ago

Ah, now this is gratifying to see. I'm not a lone crazy person. Because I read that book, with high expectations, a couple years ago and came away profoundly disappointed for many of the same reasons. I did find him to be a hell of an interesting thinker and someone with very interesting ideas, but to me, the whole book had a smell of overconfidence and incredibly weak standards of evidence. Very much in the "well I observed this phenomena, went for a walk and though deeply and clearly the reasons is X", followed by a tower of (interesting) conjecture built on top of X. I put it down to coming from the economics culture rather than a more rigorous scientific culture.

jldugger 10y ago
It's a science book; the standards of evidence are lower and often rely upon credentials. If you want rigorous science, go to the peer reviewed literature: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=kahneman&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C38&as_sdtp= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=kahneman&btnG=&as... Note that Kahneman is a psychologist, though he is affiliated with behaviorial economics.
- Retric 10y ago
  I don't think it quite met even that low standard.
- internaut 10y ago
  I read affiliated as afflicted. This sometimes happens to me. It's like Freudian slips for your mind.
31reasons 10y ago
I guess we are victims of Halo Effect as he described in the book! He won the nobel prize so we think whatever he writes must be true. Weak standards of evidence also made me bit uneasy throughout. But my System 1 just trusted the whole book because everyone seems to be liking it. Case of Social Proof i guess.
- deleted 10y ago

RodericDay 10y ago

Yeah, I started reading this and got a very strong "Steven Pinker" vibe from it. Except I pushed back a lot more against Pinker's assertions than Kahneman's.

kobayashi 10y ago
I've never read a critique of Pinker, and found his article on academic prose to be quite well-written. Would you expand upon your "Steven Pinker vibe"?
- RodericDay 10y ago
  There's multiple, none definitive (the cool thing about writing a giant tome is that somebody has to write a giant tome back). I've just picked up on them as I discuss his work online on various venues, which I feel panders very obviously to well-off westerners seeking reassurance. Here's r/AskHistorians describing his laughable characterization of the An Lushan rebellion (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/svsej/what_do_historians_think_of_steven_pinkers_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/svsej/what_d...) There's another that dismantles his use of an ancient human corpse found carrying "weapons" to suggest that there had been a murder. Yet another discusses sloppy research where me mis-portrays some joke minor journal as representative of an academic field and makes broad generalizations based on it. One day I'll collect my own compendium. In the meantime, if you're curious, just scour reddit or something.

wrp 10y ago

A few years ago, I was looking for a semi-popular book I could recommend to people on dual systems theory. I picked up Kahneman's TFS expecting it to be a good choice, but was very disappointed. His logic was sloppy and bombastic, but what I found most irritating was that he would constantly, like maybe every other page, slightly misrepresent other people's work. -------------------------- Dual systems theories hold that reasoning, categorization, and decisionmaking are the result of two interacting systems, one rule-based/symbolic and the other statistical/associative. The deliberative (Type 2) process is open to introspection but the intuitive (Type 1) is not. Which system dominates varies by situation. Intuitive reasoning dominates when there is low time or interest. It can also dominate deliberative reasoning when the cost of violating intuition appears large. The general model of interaction between the systems is that intuition and affect operate through positive feedback and the deliberative system attempts to inhibit the intuitive with varying success depending on relative coherence. While a weak form of this theory is still largely accepted as useful, there is much criticism based on the difficulty of cleanly isolating the processes. The theory seems to be fading in popularity in favor of multimodularity. The main counter-theory seems to be that deliberative reasoning is mainly cycles of intuitive process.

conistonwater 10y ago
What about What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Stanovich [1], is it better? [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300164629 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300164629

tootie 10y ago

I see the author's point and I feel it too (I'm only 2/3 through the book) but unless he has evidence to show that Kahneman used flawed research, then he is just replacing this baseless optimism with baseless pessimism. The book definitely gives a lot of overly confident and pat answers to complex questions, but the book is aimed at a mass market who are trying to grasp the basics of decision theory and are not going to read the sources.

jonahx 10y ago

How is it possible that it took until 2015 to discover the mistake in the original 1985 research (Gilovich et al.) "proving" that hot hands in basketball don't exist? It became mainstream news, discussed in places like ESPN and has been repeated countless times in popular science books. Furthermore, the debunking in the Miller and Sanjurjo article referenced in the parent's blog post is not the result of arcane mathematical analysis, but uses extremely basic math that any undergraduate could understand. It's almost shockingly hard to believe that no one noticed the problem before, when the result was the subject of such passionate, widespread controversy, and so many people had the tools to see the flaw.... And not only that, the edge case condition makes the flaw painfully obvious. From the Miller and Sanjurjo article's description of the original, flawed research: "...a streak is typically defined as a shot taken after 3, 4, 5, . . . hits". Looking at only the case of a shot taken after streaks of length 3, the miss rate is 100% (because a hit would imply the streak actually had length 4).

im3w1l 10y ago
Maybe the people who noticed decided to keep quiet, and make money off of it.
afarrell 10y ago
Usually when the popular press talk about a study, they don't link to the original study. So the number of people who talk about it is much higher than the number of people who might actually go and re-examine the study.

dwightgunning 10y ago

So, say I'm about 15% into Thinking Fast and Slow, and struggling a little with the pace/density, should I keep going with it? I'm generally interested in the topic but just got side tracked from the book and haven't picked it up in a couple months.

deeteecee 10y ago
im in the last section and honestly, looking back at it, i would've been satisfied with just reading the first 2 sections, maybe even the 3rd one. It gets more dense and narrower as you go through it I think. one thing drivin me crazy is about half the time Kahneman presents a situation and says "you would've chosen this" except that I didn't choose that. Guess I'm a weird outlier or something :P
- tome 10y ago
  > one thing drivin me crazy is about half the time Kahneman presents a situation and says "you would've chosen this" except that I didn't choose that. Guess I'm a weird outlier or something :P Oh wow, I had that experience! Thanks for putting my feeling into words.

WalterBright 10y ago

My most useful takeaway from the book is how cognitive biases negatively influence one's investment returns. I've been applying this to my own investment strategy, trying to avoid those biases.

ersii 10y ago
Have you had any successes or failure while trying to apply that to your investing strategies so far? Any particular cognitive bias you're focusing on mitigating?
- WalterBright 10y ago
  I struggle with the loss aversion bias. Because even in a good year I've done worse than the indices, I've swallowed my pride and shifted much further towards buy-and-hold in indexes. It's only been a year, so no really valid results yet. A successful strategy I've used for a long time is to hold my winners instead of selling them to "lock in" the profits.

dcw303 10y ago

I found this a very frustrating read as well. The tone of the book was over-confident and in my mind the author really goes to no attempt to explain his reasoning. I only made it as far as the probability section. I gave up after failing to understand his logic. Something about students enrolled in computer science, if Google is indicative.

blagswod 10y ago
Interesting, that's the chapter that caused me to finally put the book down. The gist of it was: people not thoroughly trained in statistics aren't good at it. This is hardly news. In fact, even highly intelligent people struggle with the Monty Hall problem, for instance.

jamesrom 10y ago

So his problem is that Kahneman was confident before the replication crisis? We should not fault a person for trusting studies and science published in countless journals.

whack 10y ago

I think there are 2 subtle distinctions to be made, in how evidence should be interpreted and responded to. A) Given XYZ evidence, I am 100% confident that premise ABC is true. B) Given XYZ evidence, I am 100% confident that accepting premise ABC as true, is the right thing to do. Sentence A is almost always false. No matter how much supporting evidence you have, the odds of the underlying premise being true, is never 100%. There is always some likelihood of all the evidence being flawed/biased/compromised in some way. Because of this, the likelihood of the underlying premise being true, is always lower than 100%. That said, even if the odds of the premise being true is only 90%, sentence B could still be true. That sentence doesn't state that the premise is guaranteed to be true. Only that given what we know, accepting the premise is the most rational thing to do. Just like deciding not to buy a lottery ticket, or doubling down on your bet when you're holding a straight flush. You might still turn out to be wrong, but that doesn't negate the fact that your earlier actions were 100% the right thing to do. Unfortunately, despite the significant differences between A and B, a casual reader may still mistake B for A. A non-perfectionist writer/editor may also mistakenly write A, when really, he means B. This might be the case with Kahneman's book. Given the evidence available at the time of his writing, the B interpretation of his assertions would still hold up well, and we shouldn't be denying that on the basis of 20/20 hindsight.

nkurz 10y ago
I like your distinction, and think there is an important difference to be made between A and B. But I don't think you've framed B quite correctly. For example, what would be the difference between "I am confident" and "I am 100% confident"? What would be the case for B in which having exactly 65% confidence would be correct? I think both A and B have an unspoken assumption of "and assuming there is no error in our measurement of XYZ, and assuming that XYZ means what we think it means, and assuming there is no other evidence we are failing to consider". Unless one's confidence in these assumptions (and probably some others) is 100%, one shouldn't have complete confidence in any particular course of action.

dschiptsov 10y ago

The big idea is to realize, internalize beyond any doubt that the brain is evolved set of highly specialized structures, some very ancient, some more recent, which communicate to each other. The emotional and instinctive parts are more fundamental and more important than language-related parts, and what we call or reflect as thinking is mostly feeling and sensing, to which verbal augmentation is merely a, well... augmentation.) The message is that cortex is by no means is everything or even most essential. The ancient, animal, non-verbal parts of the brain are still doing most of the job. As a consequence the popular myth about human's pure rationality should be discarded. We are still animals. The crucial difference is obviously a language and hence abstract thinking (in that order - we think in language labels we attach to everything, including feeling and moods). But this is not the whole picture. So called Fast Thinking is working of the ancient, animal parts of the brain.

arjun1296 10y ago

It is obvious, he has studied intuitive biases throughout his career. However, he himself said that experts make only little difference as compared to the market experts in the stock market. On an analogy, he is an expert but just like any other human. He is fallible. Our bias on the Oscar Winning - Halo Effect biased us in buying and reading. And after reading and analyzing the content. Now everything has gone to the hindsight. That is the purpose, concrete analysis of concrete condition based on rationality.

alankay1 10y ago

I was quite disappointed in this book -- having followed Kahneman since his early research with pupillometry as an indication of interest. I agree with many of the comments in this thread. Given the author -- and the importance of the subject -- it just should have been done better. But I still recommend that it be looked at for a variety of reasons, including what Kahneman calls the "expository fictions" of "System 1" and "System 2". (In talks I usually pair this up with a slide of "Maps of the Mind" by Turner to make the point that there are many characterizations of mental architectures, some at odds and some harmonious (i.e. be careful when trying to reason with such suppositions). Still, the "System 1" and "System 2" simplifications are very useful as aids to thinking about many important areas, including learning, user interface design, etc.

woodandsteel 10y ago

Kahneman's book may have a lot of dubious science for specific points. However, you need to remember that he was attacking the Economic Man model that has been standard in economic science for over a century. This model holds our economic decisions are all rational, or at least if biased, the biases are random across different people and so cancel out. That means we should always trust the unregulated market to produce ideal results, and so the government should always stay out of it, as it could only make things worse. Various economists such as Robert Schiller and his writings on "animal spirits" have argued that this is not at all the case. Kaheneman and the other behavioral economists have added a lot of empirical support, and, with some luck, economic science will shift to better fit reality.