As always, the line is:
Your brain doesn't work how you think/wish it did:
- Rationality is nowhere near as strong as you want it to be.
- You are FAR more suggestible than you think
- Rationality is primarily about getting what you want, not finding truth.
- Your memory of an experience and the experience itself differ substantially.
- Resource constraints on attention and willpower matter.
Without invoking Freud, Kahneman's core thesis is: Your brain has two distinct systems (stolen with attribution from Stanovitch):
- slow, deliberate, rational
- fast, intuitive, emotional.
Naturally, 2 dominates unless you're super-extra careful. And then we pretend that 1 was involved somehow.
Two items struck me in the book, one very important...and one highly suspicious.
- There are places where experts are expert, and useful. The discussion of experts and Kahneman's collaboration with a pro-experts expert is wonderful. One useful result: intuitive general appraisals by interviewers are a surprisingly good measure of future results. Our natural, people-awareness is awful good. Roughly as good, indeed, as the predictive success of the best designed system we could find. Hence...someone who is an intuitive expert. So...my wife who's insanely good (>4 σ )in the intuitive expert category gets science supporting her intuition.
- Kahneman's closing chapter says: So now we've examined like 6000 pages of evidence that says people are NOT rational. Therefore the government should fix things. (ed: Especially the non-rational folks in government) To my mind, that's like saying the moon's orbit will eventually decay, therefore we should blow it up. Very fast, very unsupported.
The book is a careful, long, discussion of failure modes in human rationality. It includes prospect theory (Roughly: we don't care about state as much as about delta).
Standing questions:
- How to update prospect theory with the falkenstein/hanson status/envy line.
- Why do the researchers believe that people believe the researchers on probabilities. While Kahneman notes some issues near this...I believe that people brains have no intuitive grasp of actual probability...but rather an intuitive grasp of probability categories. There are (roughly) 7 probability gradations (per side): Certain. Almost certain. high probability. about even chances. Low probability. Almost never. Never. I'm relatively convinced that these categories of intuitive probability go a long way towards explaining how people actually act. Why would osmeone be so insane as to pay (as Kahneman demonstrates) $10 per bottle of bug spray to decrease the chance of adverse effects from 15/100,000 to 5/100,000? Why, contrarily will they not accept any similar amount of money to change from 15/100,000 to 16/100,000. Prospect theory handles it a bit, but doesn't seem to completely.
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See that's my problem. I would totally sit down and calculate how much money I would demand to use the 16/100 000 spray. And be happy to get it.
No wonder I don't do well in sales.
(Turing Test Word: Pings. Which happens to be the name of where I work in sales.)
Is this re-review totally off? It sounds llke you're talking about different books.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-dont-get-it.html?m=1
I remember reading Steve's review, and then reading the section Steve was talking about in Kahneman a day or two later, and being confused. Thanks for reminding me.
The section Steve is talking about is a section in the book. It's a single example (in at least 10) in a greater explanation saying roughly: Our fast/sloppy/intuitive brain has a stereotype that it uses to define the world. Then the stereotype is used instead of careful analysis via the slow/careful/logical brain. And therefore you get this result.
He actually goes through the Bayesian correct approach by the end of that chapter...and Steve's discussion on this point SUCKS unless you stopped reading at that point, and didn't finish the chapter.
Kahneman's claim: Be Bayesian, morons...
Start with base rate. Update, depending on the reliability, but don't abandon the base rate.
'If you answered anything but A (the correct response being precisely 30 percent), you have fallen victim to the representativeness heuristic again, despite having just read about it.'
To clarify. Neither ! Nor Sailer have read the book... and I hear what you're saying about K correcting himself, but the above passage sucks. Using a flawed/useless example like the above in a slooow-brain media makes me want to avoid his book. In your teaching, do you find it sensible to illustrate a point with bogus examples?
Meh,
I have to confirm the passage, but I think they left one very important part out of their quote:
Somewhere in the analysis of at least the examples I remember was the line: "And the psychologists analyses are understood to be unreliable", which was of massive importance to the problem. Book not at hand, so I can't confirm that this was precisely that problem. It's definitely the same chapter.
Aside:
While teaching...I lie all the time. I find it's very hard to communicate anything at all without super-simplifying first, and then expanding. So I make absurd statements, act like they're true...and then slowly back off the statement when it's time to learn new stuff.
I chose A. But I was aiming at at value of "slightly above 30%".
Almost all that information was irrelevant, but I really think that someone who likes playing with math on his weekend is just more likely to have gone into engineering than law, and deliberate ignorance of this factor is just being silly.
And as I look around my desk, I can see a page on my graph paper notebook where I was competing with a colleague to solve a probability problem. For fun.
Hint: Not a lawyer.
About the lying (oversimplification to the point of wrongness) to instruct issue.
I've encountered a few situations where this has backfired:
An over-simplified explanation is given.
Person A goes "Duh. OK." And learns the lesson.
Person B goes "No, that can't be right because of X, Y and Z. This is rubbish." Ignores lesson and goes on to make mistakes that person A has avoided through being less intelligent.
I was thinking about this the other day, and at the time I had lots of examples where person B was myself. But right now the only example that comes to mind was a person who my girlfriend (at the time) was interviewing:
Interviewee "So the idiots at school were telling us that smoking marijuana would lead to being addicted to hard drugs. And I knew this was stupid. THC has NO chemical relationship to opiates. There is NO biochemical path from THC consumption to opiate addiction. I knew these teachers had no idea what they were talking about."
So he got into smoking dope... and ended up whoring himself to pay for his heroin habit.
Anyone who stayed well away from the drug scene because of the teacher's warning would have been safe from heroin. And if the teacher had given a more detailed explanation it would have made sense to the "smarter" kid and maybe stopped him from getting into drugs. OR let him see what would lead from smoking dope onto the harder stuff, and so helped him stop at a more reasonable stage along that path.
(Not the best example, but I can't think of others right now.)
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