4 ms·

How Two Psychologists Turned World of Decision Science Upside Down

31 points by Hooke 10y ago

qwrusz 10y ago
How does Michael Lewis claim he had not heard of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky until 2003 while reading a review of his book Moneyball? Lewis has an MA in Economics from the London School of Economics. And he writes books and articles related to finance/economics topics for a living. Kahneman was quite famous and had already won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work by 2003. More so, how did Michael Lewis get an MA in economics from L.S.E. without reading, or at least hearing of, Kahneman and Tversky's econ paper from 1979 - one of the most well known economics papers in history and still today the 1st or 2nd most cited economics paper ever (Google Scholar shows +40,000 citations)? Just seems odd and now I wonder what else Lewis is missing.
- EdwardCoffin 10y ago
  He could have read the paper without paying attention to the authors names, or he could have forgotten them. I certainly have forgotten the names of various authors of papers and books I have read, even those that made an impact on me. When I happened across more of their works years later, I thought I'd never heard of them. I actually have a concrete example of this. I recently had my attention drawn to David Chapman's Masters and PhD theses and some of his other works. I thought I'd never heard of him, but then I realized he was the editor of How to do research at the MIT AI lab, which I've read a bunch of times, and still return to on occasion.
Aaargh20318 10y ago
I scanned that wall of anecdote-filled text multiple times and I still can't find the answer to the title ("How Two Psychologists Turned World of Decision Science Upside Down") anywhere. What a worthless piece of fluff text. With a title like that, I expect a brief explanation of how they did it and nothing more. Maybe 2 paragraphs at most. Instead I get their life stories and what feels like the life story of half the world's population.
- rini17 10y ago
  The conclusion is actually, "we feel we failed". That's not so clickbaity.
  - Aaargh20318 10y ago
    So basically the answer is: "They didn't" ? Damn, someone managed to spend 7,920 words to say that...

31 points by Hooke 10y ago

How does Michael Lewis claim he had not heard of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky until 2003 while reading a review of his book Moneyball? Lewis has an MA in Economics from the London School of Economics. And he writes books and articles related to finance/economics topics for a living. Kahneman was quite famous and had already won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work by 2003. More so, how did Michael Lewis get an MA in economics from L.S.E. without reading, or at least hearing of, Kahneman and Tversky's econ paper from 1979 - one of the most well known economics papers in history and still today the 1st or 2nd most cited economics paper ever (Google Scholar shows +40,000 citations)? Just seems odd and now I wonder what else Lewis is missing.

EdwardCoffin 10y ago
He could have read the paper without paying attention to the authors names, or he could have forgotten them. I certainly have forgotten the names of various authors of papers and books I have read, even those that made an impact on me. When I happened across more of their works years later, I thought I'd never heard of them. I actually have a concrete example of this. I recently had my attention drawn to David Chapman's Masters and PhD theses and some of his other works. I thought I'd never heard of him, but then I realized he was the editor of How to do research at the MIT AI lab, which I've read a bunch of times, and still return to on occasion.

Aaargh20318 10y ago

I scanned that wall of anecdote-filled text multiple times and I still can't find the answer to the title ("How Two Psychologists Turned World of Decision Science Upside Down") anywhere. What a worthless piece of fluff text. With a title like that, I expect a brief explanation of how they did it and nothing more. Maybe 2 paragraphs at most. Instead I get their life stories and what feels like the life story of half the world's population.

rini17 10y ago
The conclusion is actually, "we feel we failed". That's not so clickbaity.
- Aaargh20318 10y ago
  So basically the answer is: "They didn't" ? Damn, someone managed to spend 7,920 words to say that...