8 ms·
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 a
by zug_zug 3y 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 3y agoIt’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_zug 3y agoYeah 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.
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoThat's not him though. Like, it was in all my cog psych textbooks more than twenty years ago, with cites back in the 80s (which weren't him). This is my favourite paper of theirs: http://stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/TverskyKahneman1971.pdf http://stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/TverskyKahneman197... I got into a bunch of trouble with some reviewers of my thesis for referencing this repeatedly.
- gattilorenz 3y agoIt’s also very common in psychology theories, I haven’t read “Thinking, fast and slow” but I imagine there’s more than Kahneman’s own papers cited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory
- zug_zug 3y agowow, it looks like "dual process" theory is basically the same thing. I don't know if there's a better text on dual-process theory out there (perhaps by the original authors), but regardless of who originated it, I think it's something worth learning about for everyone (and if you don't have a better source then Thinking Fast and Slow is a very good one).
- rileyphone 3y agoIt's just such a bad name though.
- underdeserver 3y agoIn software we often call it fastpath and slowpath :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lupire 3y agoIt's been called "emotion / intuition" and "logic" for centuries or millennia before the goofy System name was invented.
- raincole 3y agoIronically people like System 1/2 more than intuition/logic because the terms sound more like they are coined by System 2.
- derbOac 3y ago... except the distinction was being made in various forms long before Kahneman, and does get questioned. When you start to poke at it, what's intuitive starts to seem less so. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691612460685 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916124606... (that's a link to a defense of dual process theories, but it makes clear there's increasing criticism of them)
- cjblomqvist 3y agoDoes anyone have a link to a publicly accessible version of this paper?
- derbOac 3y agoI think this should work: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/dual-process-theory-Evans_Stanovich_PoPS13.pdf https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/dua... There's review paper coming from a more critical perspective in Psych Bulletin or Psych Review I was looking for, but I couldn't find it atm.
- paulpauper 3y agoI 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.
- btilly 3y agoThat's an interesting theoretical question. Unfortunately the reality is that the more interesting and quotable the result is, the less likely it is to replicate. So replication problems most strongly hit things that seem like they should have the greatest implications. Kind of a "worst of all worlds" scenario.
- ethanbond 3y agoAnd critically, scientific publications are incentivized likewise to publish the most outlandish claims they can possibly get away with. That same incentive affects individual scientists, who disproportionately submit the most outlandish claims they can possibly get away with. The boring stuff -- true or not -- is not worth the hassle of putting into a publishable article.
- btilly 3y agoAnd then the most outlandish of these are picked up by popular science writers. Who proceed to mangle it beyond recognition, and add a random spin. This then goes to the general public. Some believe the resulting garbage. And wind up with weird ideas. Others use that garbage to justify throwing out everything that scientists say. And then double down on random conspiracy theories, denialism, and pseudoscience. I wish there was a solution to this. But everyone is actually following their incentives here. :-(
- lupire 3y agoThe scientists push it on the pop writers, to created a Personal Brand and an industrial complex around their pet theory.
- btilly 3y agoThe 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-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... for more.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoWhat's wild to me is that anyone could read chapter 4 and not look up the original papers in disbelief. Long before the controversy was public I was reading that book and, despite claims that the reader must believe the findings, it sounded like nonsense to me. So I looked up the original paper to see what the experiment set up was, and it was unquestionably a ridiculous conclusion to draw from a deeply flawed experiment. I still never understood how that chapter got through without anyone else having the same reaction I did.
- dwighttk 3y agoIn those times, that was exactly the kind of thing that people wanted to believe
- foobiekr 3y agoI had exactly this reaction to Malcolm gladwell. It is completely obvious that gladwell across multiple books has never once read one of his references and consistently misrepresents what they say.
- kbenson 3y agoI have a slightly different take on him, which comes to the same ultimate end on how I view his work. As he's shifted from primarily a journalist to primarily a storyteller, he's chosen to sacrifice additional information and accuracy in lieu of telling a consistent and compelling narrative that support what he thinks is the important thing to take away, not necessarily what you would take away were you to review all the same information yourself. Under that understanding, I find him fun to listen to. The things he "reports" on/illuminates are interesting, but at this point I don't assume he's giving them an even handed representation, so his conclusions are not necessarily my own, and at best it's a set of things to look into and research myself if I find my interest piqued after a fun or interesting story is told.
- cranium 3y agoFor what it's worth, Kahnman answered a post that scrutinized the effect of priming: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
- pigscantfly 3y agoThanks for sharing this -- I read the book maybe a decade ago and largely discounted it as non-replicable pop-sci; this changed my opinion of Kahneman's perspective and rigor (for the better!)
- airstrike 3y agoIt looks like it's a bit more nuanced than that. What I saw from the link was some debate about what holds and what doesn't for various forms of "priming"
- coffeebeqn 3y agoThe 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
- EthanHeilman 3y ago19th Century definition of tactics aas being everything that happens within the range of cannons and strategy as everything that happens outside of cannon range, fits well to thinking fast (tactics) and slow (strategy).
- sampo 3y 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/TverskyKahneman1971.pdf http://stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/TverskyKahneman197...
- yawboakye 3y agopsychology 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.
- andrelaszlo 3y agoThat's an unexpected position for me. How do you define science? Could it be a science, according to you, or is there something fundamentally non-scientific about it?
- yawboakye 3y agoit’s fundamentally unscientific at this point. much of our current science lies in the realm of natural law. so far we haven’t found any laws that govern human behavior. what we know, with considerable certainty, is that behavior can be positively influenced. but at the point of action, nothing we know of compels any specific/predictable behavior. until we have found rigid laws of reasons that apply to both the brute and the civilized, any ‘discoveries’ of psychology are reports of someone’s idiosyncrasies, imho.
- knightoffaith 3y agoIs it not scientific to say that X property is true of human behavior more often that it is not with statistical significance?
- sn9 3y agoThere's nothing about the scientific method that requires the process to output tidy little laws to be deserving of being called science. Some fields are quite lucky that the universe is so elegantly organized, but for that isn't true for the overwhelming majority of fields with as many degrees of freedom as biological systems and anything more complex. That doesn't mean we can't conduct experiments that reproduce.
- worik 3y ago
- davetannenbaum 3y agoHis 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 3y 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 3y agoThis 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 3y 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.
- Systemling0815 3y ago[dead]
- arpa 3y agoyou have no idea what "psychology" is, do you?
- tome 3y agoI have a similar point of view as acchow, so it's possible I don't understand psychology either. Could you enlighten us about what it actually is?
- arpa 3y agoit is a positivistic science, i.e. it studies observable phenomena using the scientific method. The days of Freud and Jung where you could just smoke cigars and fart out ideas about collective unconsciousness and anal fixation are long over. Experiments are conducted, confounding variables controlled, and hypotheses (including H0) are tested. Granted, it's not as easy as in physics where you just drop a ball repeatedly and note down the results, buf it doesn't in any way make it a "softer" science. To equate psychology with self-help books is akin to equating LLMs with Markov chains.
- richrichie 3y agoExperiments involving grad students dont correlate well with how (normal) people behave in real life.
- darby_eight 3y agoI imagine this is just as fun to play with unsurprising results.
- wslh 3y 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/ssoar-2010-henrich_et_al-The_weirdest_people_in_the.pdf?sequence=1 https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/42104...
- faeriechangling 3y ago“Many” is hyperbole, “Some” is more fair and his results stood up or the replication crisis better than most of his contemporaries.
- yreg 3y agoThis 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.
- abdulhaq 3y agoI don't agree, I think if you understand science in general then you realize at an early age e.g. 20 that social/behavioral science is at best a pseudoscience
- jongjong 3y agoIt'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 3y agoI believe same was the case for "Growth mindset"
- pkkm 3y 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoBecause 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)
- owisd 3y agoYou can just leverage the “second brain” crowd — for every vaguely well-known non-fiction book someone has written up a summary for themselves and posted it on their blog.
- smcin 3y agoSure, but be sure to check they're vaguely objective, not just shills, compensated reviewers or affiliates.
- ratg13 3y agoMost people don’t absorb concepts immediately with only a simple explanation. Unless you are reading a topic you are already familiar with, reinforcement of an idea helps you to examine a concept from different angles and to solidify what is being discussed. If everyone fully absorbed and understood everything they read, schooling could be completed years in advance.
- dwighttk 3y agoIt’s the only one of those books I still don’t regret telling people “it’s good” a decade later (with a couple caveats)
- chx 3y ago[flagged]
- someguydave 3y ago[flagged]
- chx 3y agoAye well, there's your problem, the clouds. The sea temperature is already literally off the charts and we do not know why but let's just add a couple more countries worth of energy waste in datacenters producing nothing, what could possibly go wrong.
- smcin 3y agoNo, the less cynical take is it says "the second half of the book drags on and you can skip most of those chapters." Which has been generically true of much business nonfiction for decades now. How people choose to apply that knowledge predates AI: skipping it, reading any of the summary reviews available, listening to the audiobook while in gym/car/shopping, asking a friend, dipping into it selectively, etc. There are lots of low-tech alternatives.
- supafastcoder 3y 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.
- cjblomqvist 3y agoWhen 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 3y agoThe Undoing Project is a solid read about his life and work too.
- m463 3y agoan interesting michael lewis book. (lots less controversial than Going Infinite)
- __mharrison__ 3y agoI 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 3y agoHad the exact same experience. Maybe someone can enlighten us with why this is -supposedly- such a revelatory book?
- ceuk 3y agoAssuming this is a genuine question and not just intellectual posturing the obvious answer if you've ever spoken to.. most people.. is that a lot of the (admittedly somewhat simple) concepts in the book are for whatever reason, not part of the general public psyche
- xotesos 3y agoIt certainly has interesting ideas in small doses but knowing about your heuristics and biases doesn't mean you still don't fall victim to them. The real issue I have with the book is the audio book is read in such boring way by Patrick Egan. I would love to hear a different voice actor take a shot at it as it is not the most exciting book on its own anyway. Then read in such a boring way it reminds me of the worst of college classes I took. I also don't think it is the type of book that was ever meant to gain the popularity it has. It isn't even that easy to find Judgment Under Uncertainty by clicking on Kahneman's name on Amazon. Kahneman and Tversky wrote that 30 years before Thinking Fast and Slow and it is a great book. Because of its popularity I would say Thinking, Fast and Slow might be the most overrated book I can think of. A big reason for that is I would say it is the greatest marketing of a book I can think of by Random House given the subject and how dry the book is.
- whatamidoingyo 3y ago> Because of its popularity I would say Thinking, Fast and Slow might be the most overrated book I can think of. The Art of War is the most overrated book, imo. "If the enemy is more powerful than you, don't attack them!" So profound. -_-
- bartread 3y agoI 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.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoMore 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoKahneman'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?
- TedHerman 3y agoSome 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 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.68.10.2493].
- cainxinth 3y 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 3y agoTo 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".