(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.)
(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.)
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.
You can ignore anything said in chapter 4 about priming for example.
See https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... for more.
This, IMO, is the actual biggest problem with LLMs training on whatever the biggest text corpus us that's available: they don't account for the fact that not all text is equally worthy of next-token-predicting. This problem is completely solvable, almost trivially so, but I haven't seen anyone publicly describe a (scaled, in production) solution yet.
Can you explain your solution?
It's probably the AI thing I'm most excited about, and I suspect we're not far from that, although I'm betting the copyright battles are the primary obstacle to such a future at this point.
People from Europe, came to have the Industrial Revolution at just the correct moment.
Some small changes in history and it would have happened in India.
It is making a theory to fit the facts.
I do not think the author is a "white supremacist" but the book reads like that. Taking all the accidents of history and making them seem like destiny that Europeans rule the world (they do not, they never did, and they are fading from world domination fast)
Thinking Fast & Slow was a fun read, but I did not retain much more than the basic System I/II concept which I find is a useful device.
It's not just that individual studies have failed to replicate. The whole field was in question at least a decade before the book was written, and since then many of the foundational results have failed to replicate. The book was in a sense the last hurrah of a theory that was on its way out, and the replication crisis administered the coup de grace IMO.
I want something similar but for children's literature. From Ralph and the Motorcycle to Peter Pan, a lot of stuff doesn't hold up.
The books provide plenty of utility. But many things don't hold up to modern thinking. LLMs provide the opportunity to embrace classic content while throwing off the need to improvise as one parses outmoded ideas.
You could not redact piece of art out of "old ideas". It is like re-drawing classics paintings but mask nipples and removing blood.
And books which could be redacted this way without falling apart — well, don't read such books at all and don't feed them to the children.
Literature for children must not be dumbed down, but exactly as for adults, but better.
Also please omit "who has a better story than bran"
It's saying that the author's invented metric may indicate that the studies within each chapter may not replicate. No actual replication studies were done to produce the table in that post.
I included that blog post as a guide to what other results may be suspect.
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.
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.
If the best evidence that Gladwell could find to support his points, don't support his points, then it really makes me question the utility of trying to find evidence to support Gladwell's points.
It may be that, the reason why no subject matter expert makes the points that Gladwell does is because Gladwell's points are either wrong or not even wrong.
On the other hand if you see Gladwell for what I think he is, which is an entertaining storyteller using science as a backdrop to present his view of the world, and willing to twist it to suit his view, then he's really no different than many other writers. In that case you can enjoy him or not, at your leisure, just as you would any other editorial or op-ed piece. Entertainment is entertainment, and his content is entertaining even if I don't expect it to be true (to be clear, I'm approaching this as someone that mostly consumes his podcasts, which some chapters of his books have been directly converted to. I wouldn't want to spend the time reading this content that's not true, but I'm happy to listen to it while on a drive).
Whether he's causing more harm than good overall to the public is another question, but honestly that's a much bigger discussion with a lot of much bigger problems than him, so I'm not sure it's worth getting worked up over.
Stories/memes/narratives are the most easy/potent form of mental ingestion - so much so that I think humans cannot ingest facts or ideas at all, only stories. And this puts a collective responsibility on all of us to be very careful about the stories we create.
And that could be for a number of reasons. Of course, sometimes the results are just wrong, due to statistical flukes, or too creative data cleaning and analysis. Often the results might just be much more limited than what the original study claims: Maybe the results of a psychological study is valid for MIT students in the beginning of the semester, before lunch, but not for Yale students in the early afternoon. In this case the only mistake would have been to assume the results were universal.
It is amazing how many smart people have bad intuition on science, misunderstand the null hypothesis, etc. So much for the viability of a scientific thinking populace afaict: it seems not possible to pull off.
This tendency seems to be capitalized on fairly heavily in political media by finding some poorly supported assertion of the other side to criticize, which causes people to assume the opposite is true.
But such a small fraction of possible propositions are true that it is unlikely to be worthwhile to waste much time on propositions with no evidence.
I'll have you know you just nearly nerd sniped a mathematician ;-)
I suspect I may not be the first person to entertain this question, perhaps there is some literature on the matter.
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/TverskyKahneman197...
I got into a bunch of trouble with some reviewers of my thesis for referencing this repeatedly.
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).
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)
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.
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/TverskyKahneman197...
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.
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.
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.
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. :-(
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...
My impression is that the priming chapter is bunk, but the rest has generally held up. Is that no longer true?
Where psychology is massively failing to replicate is in trying to characterise healthy individuals. Typically the work of Kahneman.
But that's what interest people and sells, pop psychology.
I'm only tangentially following the whole autism/Asperger's/ADD/ADHD development, and I'm growing more and more convinced that all these categories are mostly arbitrary constructs grown out of random history and academia politics. Happy to be proved wrong here, though.
How do you define science? Could it be a science, according to you, or is there something fundamentally non-scientific about it?
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.
Science is that which could be disproved.
It is a very small, and very important, part of human knowledge.
See Chalmers' What is This Thing Called Science? for an introduction to these kinds of topics, or Kuhn and Feyerabend's work for historical responses. (And the Duhem-Quine thesis for the "auxiliary hypothesis" response to falsifiability I hinted at with my example.)
* 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.
> But let’s say you can narrow it down to one good one, and you can find the time to read it. You plunk down an absurd $30 (of which, I’m told, less than $3 goes to the author) for a bulky hardcover and you quickly discover that the author doesn’t have all that much to say. But a book is a big thing, and they had to fill it all up, so the author padded it. There are several common techniques.
> One is to repeat your point over and over, each time slightly differently. This is surprisingly popular. Writing a book on how code is law, an idea so simple it can fit in the book’s title? Just give example after example after example.
> Another is to just fill the book with unnecessary detail. Arguing that the Bush administration is incompetent? Fill your book up with citation after citation. (Readers must love being hit over the head with evidence for a claim they’re already willing to believe.)
> I have nothing against completeness, accuracy, or preciseness, but if you really want a broad audience to hear what you have to say, you’ve got to be short. Put the details, for the ten people who care about them, on your website. Then take the three pages you have left, and put them on your website too.
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.
Some people want more or less evidence based on their level of skepticism or critical thinking, while others want more evidence to reinforce the soundness of their inferred position on a topic, especially if it's a topic unfamiliar to them. Other people are under time constraints and just want the key points and a brief presentation.
This should be dealt with by pressuring the publishing industry not to inflate books and fill them with fluff. This could be done by not buying these kind of books, and publicly shaming publishers who engage in this behavior. It's easier in non fiction books since the amount of fluff in fiction books is a more subjective matter.
You can't shame them into buying books they can't sell.
How much electricity does it take an LLM to summarize a book? I'm sure the carbon emissions involved are trivial, and if they aren't, I've always been of the belief that (like eating meat) people are going to do what they want to do regardless of the environmental cost, so it's better to focus your ire on reducing the environmental cost. The problem here isn't using an LLM to summarize a book, it's that we've got a power grid fueled mainly by fossil fuels. (That is a problem that will fix itself in no time anyway now that renewables are cheaper and the gap is widening.)
This applies equally to Sci-Fi and fantasy doorstopper novels. At least those have interesting filler—sometimes even better than the main story.
So you get a decade of "business nonfiction" bookstand fodder which is claims with high shock quality but often not relicable, mixed with anecdotes, to signal the reader's self-declared learnedness.
Combine this with the long-tailed nature of the statistic "the average American only reads one book a year" and it's frightening. I think Scott Galloway said sales of his e-book are >10x more than his paper book.
And during Covid lots of people got exposed for having fake bookshelf backdrops.
Can you read the title?
The author's goal is to convey an idea to the reader. He breaks it up into small overlapping chunks and gradually doles out these small overlapping chunks over the course of the book, sometimes backtracking and repeating an idea with a different example, all accompanied by a compelling narrative.
If he does his job well then the reader doesn't notice that spaced-repetition learning is happening because the supporting examples are entertaining enough to continue reading. In the worst case, the author gets the exact criticism that you are leveling.
Honestly, if you had Mathematics books written like Thinking, Fast and Slow or Freakonomics you'd have a lot more students passing calculus.[1]
So, here's a challenge for you - in your area of expertise (whatever that is), write down the chapters of a hypothetical book you would write to explain one or two foundational principles to an outsider (to that area). It's pretty hard to do. Then compare with best-selling non-fiction aimed at outsiders like Freakonomics, etc.
I did this (chapter overview thing) and realised pretty quickly that I had planned a really boring book.
[1] I read Thinking, Fast and Slow around 2011, and I read The Mom Test last year. Almost all of the sub-themes of the former is still in my memory. The only thing I remember of The Mom Test is that people will lie to you to protect your feelings.
most non fiction could be well-summarized as a lengthy blog post
> Most books should be blog posts. Most blog posts should be tweets. Most tweets shouldn't exit.
(Looking at you, The Checklist Manifesto)
Our brains learn best when they encounter something often across time (spaced repetition).
Reading a single tweet may summarize the book, but the chances of you recalling the idea in an appropriate situation is much lower than if you had spent hours on it.
The right checklist organizes uniformity, success, and safety in almost every human endeavor. - @SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs
"Use checklists." - @AtulGawande
There, now you don't need to read the book.
History of science books thankfully stave off that final third until at least 80%. However, their final chapter or two universally manages to be a letdown. It's either wild optimistic speculation, hype for a theory that's debunked 5 years after publication, or a focus that accidentally happened to predict the course of science post-publication. The story is told in a tonally jarring manner compared to the tight narrative in the rest of the book.
My #1 suspect for this disease is a desire to connect the content of the book to real life. Such attempts miss more often than they drive the point home, even if they're factually correct.
The last 20% shifts in tone and goes into speculating on a general framework for genetic selection outside of biological systems. Very speculative, interesting, and birthed the term meme
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.
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.
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)
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.
(lots less controversial than Going Infinite)
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.
The Art of War is the most overrated book, imo. "If the enemy is more powerful than you, don't attack them!"
So profound. -_-
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?
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.