Re-reading Kahneman's “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

I did find him to be a hell of an interesting thinker and someone with very interesting ideas, but to me, the whole book had a smell of overconfidence and incredibly weak standards of evidence. Very much in the "well I observed this phenomena, went for a walk and though deeply and clearly the reasons is X", followed by a tower of (interesting) conjecture built on top of X.

I put it down to coming from the economics culture rather than a more rigorous scientific culture.

It became mainstream news, discussed in places like ESPN and has been repeated countless times in popular science books. Furthermore, the debunking in the Miller and Sanjurjo article referenced in the parent's blog post is not the result of arcane mathematical analysis, but uses extremely basic math that any undergraduate could understand.

It's almost shockingly hard to believe that no one noticed the problem before, when the result was the subject of such passionate, widespread controversy, and so many people had the tools to see the flaw....

And not only that, the edge case condition makes the flaw painfully obvious. From the Miller and Sanjurjo article's description of the original, flawed research: "...a streak is typically defined as a shot taken after 3, 4, 5, . . . hits". Looking at only the case of a shot taken after streaks of length 3, the miss rate is 100% (because a hit would imply the streak actually had length 4).

> I am surprised at the blind spot I had when first reading it – Kahneman’s overconfidence didn’t register with me.

Wow, this hits me pretty hard too. My impression of the book was of Kahneman being a subtle and humble thinker, in stark contrast to the bombast of Nassim Taleb of "The Black Swan".

A great post, if only for this and drawing my attention to the fact that the "hot hand" effect may actually exist... I've definitely used it as an example of when people are liable to see patterns in the noise :-(

But I still recommend that it be looked at for a variety of reasons, including what Kahneman calls the "expository fictions" of "System 1" and "System 2". (In talks I usually pair this up with a slide of "Maps of the Mind" by Turner to make the point that there are many characterizations of mental architectures, some at odds and some harmonious (i.e. be careful when trying to reason with such suppositions).

Still, the "System 1" and "System 2" simplifications are very useful as aids to thinking about many important areas, including learning, user interface design, etc.

I am mainly thinking of a) many forms of priming are firmly established at this point, and b) Kahneman specifically called out researchers to more thoroughly vet their findings for the others.

This conflicts with this article's claims that priming is not established, and that Kahneman has doubled-down on it.

I suspect the confusion comes from the many forms of priming, some of which are established, others of which are suspect.

A) Given XYZ evidence, I am 100% confident that premise ABC is true.

B) Given XYZ evidence, I am 100% confident that accepting premise ABC as true, is the right thing to do.

Sentence A is almost always false. No matter how much supporting evidence you have, the odds of the underlying premise being true, is never 100%. There is always some likelihood of all the evidence being flawed/biased/compromised in some way. Because of this, the likelihood of the underlying premise being true, is always lower than 100%.

That said, even if the odds of the premise being true is only 90%, sentence B could still be true. That sentence doesn't state that the premise is guaranteed to be true. Only that given what we know, accepting the premise is the most rational thing to do. Just like deciding not to buy a lottery ticket, or doubling down on your bet when you're holding a straight flush. You might still turn out to be wrong, but that doesn't negate the fact that your earlier actions were 100% the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, despite the significant differences between A and B, a casual reader may still mistake B for A. A non-perfectionist writer/editor may also mistakenly write A, when really, he means B. This might be the case with Kahneman's book. Given the evidence available at the time of his writing, the B interpretation of his assertions would still hold up well, and we shouldn't be denying that on the basis of 20/20 hindsight.

Various economists such as Robert Schiller and his writings on "animal spirits" have argued that this is not at all the case. Kaheneman and the other behavioral economists have added a lot of empirical support, and, with some luck, economic science will shift to better fit reality.

I still liked the distinguishing characteristics between the "Fast" and "Slow" brains (the 2 systems) that Kahneman uses (Which I think he borrowed from another researcher, whose name skips me). It's a great way to think about how the brain works and you can neatly categorise some things as part of System A and some as System B. But the behavioural science studies leave much to be desired.

Then again, perhaps that is the uncertain nature of behavioural science?

I only made it as far as the probability section. I gave up after failing to understand his logic. Something about students enrolled in computer science, if Google is indicative.

However, he himself said that experts make only little difference as compared to the market experts in the stock market. On an analogy, he is an expert but just like any other human. He is fallible. Our bias on the Oscar Winning - Halo Effect biased us in buying and reading. And after reading and analyzing the content. Now everything has gone to the hindsight.

That is the purpose, concrete analysis of concrete condition based on rationality.

I'm generally interested in the topic but just got side tracked from the book and haven't picked it up in a couple months.

We should not fault a person for trusting studies and science published in countless journals.

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Dual systems theories hold that reasoning, categorization, and decisionmaking are the result of two interacting systems, one rule-based/symbolic and the other statistical/associative. The deliberative (Type 2) process is open to introspection but the intuitive (Type 1) is not.

Which system dominates varies by situation. Intuitive reasoning dominates when there is low time or interest. It can also dominate deliberative reasoning when the cost of violating intuition appears large.

The general model of interaction between the systems is that intuition and affect operate through positive feedback and the deliberative system attempts to inhibit the intuitive with varying success depending on relative coherence.

While a weak form of this theory is still largely accepted as useful, there is much criticism based on the difficulty of cleanly isolating the processes. The theory seems to be fading in popularity in favor of multimodularity. The main counter-theory seems to be that deliberative reasoning is mainly cycles of intuitive process.

The emotional and instinctive parts are more fundamental and more important than language-related parts, and what we call or reflect as thinking is mostly feeling and sensing, to which verbal augmentation is merely a, well... augmentation.)

The message is that cortex is by no means is everything or even most essential. The ancient, animal, non-verbal parts of the brain are still doing most of the job. As a consequence the popular myth about human's pure rationality should be discarded. We are still animals. The crucial difference is obviously a language and hence abstract thinking (in that order - we think in language labels we attach to everything, including feeling and moods). But this is not the whole picture.

So called Fast Thinking is working of the ancient, animal parts of the brain.