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I read Thinking: Fast and Slow a few years ago when it was all the hype and was not convinced. I remember many experiments where it was clear to me that the sub
by lqet 5y ago
I read Thinking: Fast and Slow a few years ago when it was all the hype and was not convinced. I remember many experiments where it was clear to me that the subjects just answered a different question than the one the researcher asked them. And I do not mean that they "anchored" their answers on something else or they replaced the question with a different question because they had no answer to the original question - they just had a completely different understanding of the question itself, and their answers to this question were correct, even in "System 2."
For example, I always had the suspicion (which may be wrong) that in questions like "which is a more likely outcome of 6 coin tosses, HHHHHH or HTHHTT", people tend to understand this question as: "which is a more likely outcome of 6 coin tosses, a sequence of 6 heads, or another sequence without any obvious regularity in it", in which case the latter is clearly the correct answer.
Now, in my experience, people with slight autistic tendencies often have problems with sorting their impressions into broad, general categories, but instead always analyze (even remember) the exact impression (or "special case") they are confronted with. For people like this, the question "HHHHHH or HTHHTT" is a completely different question than for the majority of the population, for which HTHHTT is a class of outcomes, not a specific one.
So, the problem to me does not seem to be a problem with human intuition for probability (or with "System 1", in Kahneman's words), but just one of semantics. If you go further and assume that scientists have a higher percentage of people with autistic tendencies than the general population, then the problem simply becomes one of communication between the researcher and the subject.
- muki 5y agoImo a very good "alternative" perspective to Thinking: Fast and Slow (very well researched and very well argued, although the basic premise was quite unintuitive - to me at least - it only started to "click" towards the end of the book) on how (evolved, human) reason might work is the book The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. It was suggested to me by an American forensics professor and was probably one of the most important books I read in 2019. I don't want to hype it too much, but I sort of also do. I highly recommend it even (or especially) if you won't agree with everything they have to say. It's quite long, but totally worth the time and effort.
- leephillips 5y agoThat’s an interesting conjecture, and I wonder if you have any evidence for it. In teaching probability and asking students this exact question about the results of coin tosses, most do say the second sequence is more likely (early in the class), and they are in fact answering the question that we intend them to answer. But, after further discussion, most accept that the sequences are equally likely. It’s my observation of that specific transition in understanding that convinces me that they are, in fact, considering the particular sequences that we want them to consider, and not, as you conjecture, substituting a general notion of some class of sequences. Further, there are always those several students who just never buy it, no matter how much evidence and calculation I show them. They can’t overcome their faulty intuitions.
- nisegami 5y ago>For people like this, the question "HHHHHH or HTHHTT" is a completely different question than for the majority of the population, for which HTHHTT is a class of outcomes, not a specific one. Could you clarify which group experiences "HTHHTT [as] a class of outcomes"? I'm pretty confident in my reading that this applies to the general population, but wanted to check.