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Comment by freshhawk | Hacker News Reader

Ah, now this is gratifying to see. I'm not a lone crazy person. Because I read that book, with high expectations, a couple years ago and came away profoundly disappointed for many of the same reasons.

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.

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I'm not sure we read the same book; I don't remember any such occasion like that. Every such conjecture was followed by a bunch of experimental evidence. There are a ton of references associated with the points.

That's no guarantee of the rigor, of course, but I don't think yours is a fair characterization of the book. Are you sure you're not confusing it with Gladwell? ;-)

It's been a while since I read it, but his experimental evidence was a lot of tiny studies with no replication. I tend to not view a single study as strong evidence at all, especially in the social sciences. And history hasn't been particularly kind to many of those findings.

I went in really wanting to love the book, it was universally praised and I was pretty high on Ariely at the time, but even with that bias I still found large chunks quite unconvincing.

Perhaps it was just the writing style or something, or the fact that the beginning of the book focused a lot on those priming studies at a time when that entire area of research was profoundly embarrassing the social sciences.

(re: Gladwell, that's a good way of putting it, it was uncomfortably Gladwellian! Not that level obviously, but not far enough away!)

Reading the book, I had to stop many times to reflect on how poorly constructed the conclusions were. Many of his conclusions suffered from the same biases that he had "discovered", and yet he appeared to be blithely unaware of his own biases.

My favorite part was his discussion of the Linda problem, where he would get different results depending on how the question was phrased. In the book, he never once considered that the problem may be that his formulations of the problem were not well communicated to the study participants.

In the end, I decided that his research into cognitive bias was more a journey of self exploration, but somehow he discovered these biases in everyone except himself.

> In the end, I decided that his research into cognitive bias was more a journey of self exploration, but somehow he discovered these biases in everyone except himself.

Maybe fixing humans is impossible and it would be better for meta-meta-cognition to be accomplished by other people. Clearly they are quite good at it already!

Suppose you had a complete record of a person's speech and writing i.e. some of their outputs.

Could a software be devised which gave the equivalent of a 3rd party observation on your choices? Could you even identify choices from the data?

That's just another example of real research with nuanced conclusions being transformed into pseudo-science for pop-psychology and business management books. Almost every book I read in this area I'm at least familiar with some of the research, or end up reading some of it as I go along. It seems like all books in this class of non-fiction best sellers overstates their conclusions in almost exactly the same way.

Same book, but obviously we have different "triggers". Like 'freshhawk', I found Kahneman's book to be astonishingly full of faulty logic and difficult to finish, but I have no problem reading Gladwell. Here's an HN thread from a a few years ago with my summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3431815

Perhaps it's that Kahneman is in the "uncanny valley" between science and popular writing. Since Gladwell is (for me) safely on the popular side, I find him engaging rather than misleading. But I'm pushed away by Kahneman's apparent overconfidence in places that I'm certain he's wrong, including such examples as Jason gives.

Ah, I found a pdf of the book and did some searches to jog my memory. It was probably the section where he describes going to walks with one of his associates to discuss ideas about decision making, bias and rationality and "examining our own intuitions" to gauge how closely they fit rational actor economic models or their proposed alternate models.

I find this whole "well I examined my intuitions about X so that is some evidence of this model of human decision making about X" that is immensely popular in philosophy (especially meta-ethics) and economics to just be embarrassing garbage. So that definitely hit a very strong bias I have. And it seemed completely out of place in a book concerned with human irrationality.

I guess we are victims of Halo Effect as he described in the book! He won the nobel prize so we think whatever he writes must be true.

Weak standards of evidence also made me bit uneasy throughout. But my System 1 just trusted the whole book because everyone seems to be liking it. Case of Social Proof i guess.

It's a science book; the standards of evidence are lower and often rely upon credentials. If you want rigorous science, go to the peer reviewed literature: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=kahneman&btnG=&as...

Note that Kahneman is a psychologist, though he is affiliated with behaviorial economics.

I read affiliated as afflicted. This sometimes happens to me. It's like Freudian slips for your mind.

I don't think it quite met even that low standard.

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