33 ms·

Why We Think

147 points by gmays 1y ago

an0malous 1y ago
The studies in Thinking Fast and Slow mostly failed replication: 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...
- glial 1y ago
  Yes, but the overall framework - that our thinking can be broadly divided into habits/reaction and deliberation/forecasting - still holds, with a ton of supporting neural evidence.
  - an0malous 1y ago
    I don’t think even that is true or particularly useful. Why does it need to be binary? Couldn’t it be a spectrum? Are “fast thoughts” always habits and reactions? Some people can calculate large numbers very quickly, some people describe their inspiration for complex ideas happening in a single moment like a muse delivered it to them. Some people process thoughts and feelings for decades until they suddenly snap. I don’t think this “fast vs slow thoughts” framework really has any value to it, and it excludes a lot of thought patterns.
    - glial 1y ago
      In terms of being useful, it depends on the field. In reinforcement learning, for example, the entire field is divided into 'model-free' and 'model-based' approaches. Model-free approaches are learning state-action mappings, which are like habits or 'fast' thinking. Model-based approaches try to build a world model that allows planning and forecasting. If you're looking for utility in terms of understanding cognition, here are some resources if you're interested - pop-sci books written by cognitive scientists: - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-mind-within-the-brain-9780199891887?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-mind-within-the-... - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3627517.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo362751... Is the division true? Of course not - to paraphrase Box, all models are wrong. But some are useful. This one is useful.
- Recursing 1y ago
  That's not true, or at least it only applies to some chapters. Most studies in the book did replicate.
  - username332211 1y ago
    Do you happen to know how many of the interesting studies replicated? A book can cite of studies, but the principal conclusions could be based only on a small subset of the citations. I particular, I'd be very curios to know how many of the replicable results require a "behavioral" explanation and how many are explainable trough the utility functions and rational agents.
  - an0malous 1y ago
    No they did not, from the link I shared: > The mean power is 46%, which implies that only half of the results would be replicated in exact replication studies. The success rate in actual replication studies is often lower and may be as low as the estimated discovery rate (Bartos & Schimmack, 2020). So, replicability is somewhere between 12% and 46%. Even if half of the results are replicable, we do not know which results are replicable and which one’s are not. The Chapter-based analyses provide some clues which findings may be less trustworthy (implicit priming) and which ones may be more trustworthy (overconfidence), but the main conclusion is that the empirical basis for claims in “Thinking: Fast and Slow” is shaky.
cantor_S_drug 1y ago
> We humans cannot immediately provide the answer for "What's 12345 times 56789?" Some humans can. https://youtube.com/shorts/A2-I7tjl70w https://youtube.com/shorts/A2-I7tjl70w Test time compute reminds me of this artistic image. We are asking the model to look inside and unfold and tug on the compressed knotted threads and see which ones are useful. https://ibb.co/hRWC2S0V https://ibb.co/hRWC2S0V
zkmon 1y ago
Thinking evolved in creatures only to help correlate the past to future, using some memory from the past. The correlations and responses gradually get codified into instincts and genes to help bypass the thinking, which is costly and slow. Human thinking is considered a bad situation if the thinking goes beyond what's immediately needed, or if it makes the mind unavailable to process inputs from the senses. Any person who is lost in thought is in reality suffering from a lack of coordination between their body and mind, as their mind is no longer serving their body. It is not unusual that thinking considered same as worrying, as it indicates that person is unable to process information or concerned about something.
- ithkuil 1y ago
  And yet nature has managed to find a niche for this dysfunctional behaviour as a subset of such individuals have used the extra useless brain cycles to produce new knowledge and ways of thinking that transformed the societies in which they lived giving them an edge over competition and improved the odds of the survival of their kind.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Think of it as overcoming a local maxima. Thinking is expensive so requires more time getting food to supply that thinking, and then evolve that thinking to be smarter over time. The difficult part is getting thru the early bottleneck where your thinking isn't supplying massive amounts of excess calories that can be used on exploratory thinking.
- Noumenon72 1y ago
  There's no way for evolution to read the history of how an organism responded to something and codify it into an instinct. All it can operate on is whether the organism reproduced. If a tendency to mull things over made the organism survive, that's what gets codified, not the actions it chose. The whole advantage of thinking is being able to select adaptive responses to situations that change too rapidly for evolution to ever hard code as instincts.
  - 1y ago
rabbitlord 1y ago
I’ve always felt it’s unfair that people attribute the “System 1/System 2” dual-reasoning idea to KT. Their research was mostly behavioral, and many of their classic psychology experiments (Linda problem, law of small numbers, representativeness bias, etc.) never mentioned two systems. The dual-process framework only emerged around the 2000s in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Jonathan Evans, Keith Stanovich), which later provided brain-based evidence for it. When the book came out, KT basically retrofitted their earlier behavioral work into this newer two-system framework. The book made the distinction famous, but that wasn’t really KT’s original contribution. Their biggest impact was bringing psychology into economics, i.e., prospect theory, alternative utility functions, and ultimately the creation of behavioral economics. I think people often don’t give enough credit to what they actually pioneered, and instead celebrate them for concepts they didn’t really originate.
- matusp 1y ago
  I also find it funny when they attribute to Kahneman the very observation that people sometimes decide instinctively and sometimes not. It's like some kind of science-washing.
nmca 1y ago
Lillian’s blog is extremely good in general & if it’s new to you I suggest checking out the other posts also. I particularly enjoyed the one on human data.
analog8374 1y ago
I observe a thought. I react to that experience by directing my attention to another thought. And so on. A chain of that. That's thinking. Why? I guess it comes down to ability. The ability to see thoughts. The ability to choose the next thought to some degree maybe.
CommenterPerson 1y ago
Misleading title. Went from a very short note about Why We Think into a TLDR about AI.
abcde88 1y ago
dnr
vismit2000 1y ago
Cogito, ergo sum

147 points by gmays 1y ago

The studies in Thinking Fast and Slow mostly failed replication: 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...

glial 1y ago
Yes, but the overall framework - that our thinking can be broadly divided into habits/reaction and deliberation/forecasting - still holds, with a ton of supporting neural evidence.
- an0malous 1y ago
  I don’t think even that is true or particularly useful. Why does it need to be binary? Couldn’t it be a spectrum? Are “fast thoughts” always habits and reactions? Some people can calculate large numbers very quickly, some people describe their inspiration for complex ideas happening in a single moment like a muse delivered it to them. Some people process thoughts and feelings for decades until they suddenly snap. I don’t think this “fast vs slow thoughts” framework really has any value to it, and it excludes a lot of thought patterns.
  - glial 1y ago
    In terms of being useful, it depends on the field. In reinforcement learning, for example, the entire field is divided into 'model-free' and 'model-based' approaches. Model-free approaches are learning state-action mappings, which are like habits or 'fast' thinking. Model-based approaches try to build a world model that allows planning and forecasting. If you're looking for utility in terms of understanding cognition, here are some resources if you're interested - pop-sci books written by cognitive scientists: - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-mind-within-the-brain-9780199891887?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-mind-within-the-... - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3627517.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo362751... Is the division true? Of course not - to paraphrase Box, all models are wrong. But some are useful. This one is useful.
Recursing 1y ago
That's not true, or at least it only applies to some chapters. Most studies in the book did replicate.
- username332211 1y ago
  Do you happen to know how many of the interesting studies replicated? A book can cite of studies, but the principal conclusions could be based only on a small subset of the citations. I particular, I'd be very curios to know how many of the replicable results require a "behavioral" explanation and how many are explainable trough the utility functions and rational agents.
- an0malous 1y ago
  No they did not, from the link I shared: > The mean power is 46%, which implies that only half of the results would be replicated in exact replication studies. The success rate in actual replication studies is often lower and may be as low as the estimated discovery rate (Bartos & Schimmack, 2020). So, replicability is somewhere between 12% and 46%. Even if half of the results are replicable, we do not know which results are replicable and which one’s are not. The Chapter-based analyses provide some clues which findings may be less trustworthy (implicit priming) and which ones may be more trustworthy (overconfidence), but the main conclusion is that the empirical basis for claims in “Thinking: Fast and Slow” is shaky.

cantor_S_drug 1y ago

> We humans cannot immediately provide the answer for "What's 12345 times 56789?" Some humans can. https://youtube.com/shorts/A2-I7tjl70w https://youtube.com/shorts/A2-I7tjl70w Test time compute reminds me of this artistic image. We are asking the model to look inside and unfold and tug on the compressed knotted threads and see which ones are useful. https://ibb.co/hRWC2S0V https://ibb.co/hRWC2S0V

zkmon 1y ago

Thinking evolved in creatures only to help correlate the past to future, using some memory from the past. The correlations and responses gradually get codified into instincts and genes to help bypass the thinking, which is costly and slow. Human thinking is considered a bad situation if the thinking goes beyond what's immediately needed, or if it makes the mind unavailable to process inputs from the senses. Any person who is lost in thought is in reality suffering from a lack of coordination between their body and mind, as their mind is no longer serving their body. It is not unusual that thinking considered same as worrying, as it indicates that person is unable to process information or concerned about something.

ithkuil 1y ago
And yet nature has managed to find a niche for this dysfunctional behaviour as a subset of such individuals have used the extra useless brain cycles to produce new knowledge and ways of thinking that transformed the societies in which they lived giving them an edge over competition and improved the odds of the survival of their kind.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Think of it as overcoming a local maxima. Thinking is expensive so requires more time getting food to supply that thinking, and then evolve that thinking to be smarter over time. The difficult part is getting thru the early bottleneck where your thinking isn't supplying massive amounts of excess calories that can be used on exploratory thinking.
Noumenon72 1y ago
There's no way for evolution to read the history of how an organism responded to something and codify it into an instinct. All it can operate on is whether the organism reproduced. If a tendency to mull things over made the organism survive, that's what gets codified, not the actions it chose. The whole advantage of thinking is being able to select adaptive responses to situations that change too rapidly for evolution to ever hard code as instincts.
- 1y ago

rabbitlord 1y ago

I’ve always felt it’s unfair that people attribute the “System 1/System 2” dual-reasoning idea to KT. Their research was mostly behavioral, and many of their classic psychology experiments (Linda problem, law of small numbers, representativeness bias, etc.) never mentioned two systems. The dual-process framework only emerged around the 2000s in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Jonathan Evans, Keith Stanovich), which later provided brain-based evidence for it. When the book came out, KT basically retrofitted their earlier behavioral work into this newer two-system framework. The book made the distinction famous, but that wasn’t really KT’s original contribution. Their biggest impact was bringing psychology into economics, i.e., prospect theory, alternative utility functions, and ultimately the creation of behavioral economics. I think people often don’t give enough credit to what they actually pioneered, and instead celebrate them for concepts they didn’t really originate.

matusp 1y ago
I also find it funny when they attribute to Kahneman the very observation that people sometimes decide instinctively and sometimes not. It's like some kind of science-washing.

nmca 1y ago

Lillian’s blog is extremely good in general & if it’s new to you I suggest checking out the other posts also. I particularly enjoyed the one on human data.

analog8374 1y ago

I observe a thought. I react to that experience by directing my attention to another thought. And so on. A chain of that. That's thinking. Why? I guess it comes down to ability. The ability to see thoughts. The ability to choose the next thought to some degree maybe.

CommenterPerson 1y ago

Misleading title. Went from a very short note about Why We Think into a TLDR about AI.

abcde88 1y ago

dnr

vismit2000 1y ago

Cogito, ergo sum