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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

The density of non-replicable results varies by chapter.

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 is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and Slow taking into account the current state of research. Oh, and do it in the voice, style and structure of Tim Urban complete with crappy stick figure drawings."

Awesome prompt!

Same! Just earlier today I was wanting to do this with "The Moral Animal" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

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.

The thing with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it make it essentially all about geographic determinism. There's another book (Why the West Rules--For Now written before China had really fully emerged on the stage) which argues that, yes, geography played an important role in which cores emerged earliest. BUT if you look at the sweep of history, the eastern core was arguably more advanced than the western core at various times. So a head start can't be the only answer.

The book specifically considers Eurasia to be one geographical region and it does acknowledge the technological developments in China. The fact that Europe became the winner in this race, according to GGS, is a sign that while geography is important it does not determine the course of history. It is not all about geographic determinism

It is a snapshot in time, and so wrong if viewed in a longer context.

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)

I enjoyed both GGS and WTWRFN, but in a mode where I basically ignored the thesis, reading instead for the factual information so clearly presented. Like the coverage of the Polynesian diaspora in GGS that has really stuck with me.

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.

I thought the OP was joking!

I would actually like to have books that had "Thinking Fast and Slow" as a prerequisite. Many data visualization books could be summed up as a bar chart is easily consumed by System 1. The visual noise creates mental strain on System 2.

Then we just need the LLM that will rewrite your book taking into account the current state of LLM hallucination behaviour.

"please finish game of thrones treating the impending zombie invasion as an allegory for global warming"

Also please omit "who has a better story than bran"

Didn't George say it is such an allegory?

Not me, if I'm going to take the time to read something, I want it to have been written, reviewed and edited by a human. There is far too much high fidelity information to assimilate that I'm missing out on to put in low fidelity stuff

Then don't copy and paste your copy of Thinking Fast and Slow into your AI along with my prompt then?

(My comment was less about my behavior but an attempt to encourage others to evaluate my thinking in hopes that they may apply it to their own in order to benefit our collective understanding)

Most human authors are frankly far too stupid to be worth reading, even if they do put care into their work.

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.

It hardly matters what sources you are using if you filter it through something that has less understanding than a two year old, if any, no matter how eloquent it can express itself.

> 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?

I imagine it looks something like "Censor all writing that contradicts my worldview"

It's not even clear that the dual process system 1/system 2 metaphor is accurate at all, so it may not be possible to redeem a book whose thesis is that the dual process model is correct.

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.

>This is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and Slow taking into account the...

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.

It will not be anything lice classic content anymore.

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.

Maybe use chatGPT to make this make sense.

It isn't redaction but reasonable and artful substitution. It isn't about dumbing down, but removing dumb ideas.

is there a 'thinking fast and slow: the reproducible bits' recut? I know with films there's fan made edits.

We need O'Reilly: The Good Parts for books...

That isn't what that blog post is saying.

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.

My comment about priming is due to articles like https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-.... As https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-... shows, Daniel Kahneman came to agree that priming research was bunk.

I included that blog post as a guide to what other results may be suspect.

What's wild to me is that anyone could read chapter 4 and not look up the original papers in disbelief.

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.

In those times, that was exactly the kind of thing that people wanted to believe

I had exactly this reaction to Malcolm gladwell. It is completely obvious that gladwell across multiple books has never once read one of his references and consistently misrepresents what they say.

I have a slightly different take on him, which comes to the same ultimate end on how I view his work.

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.

But once you fact-check him a few times, then you won't be able to trust that his sources support his points anymore, which then raises the question: Is there ANY evidence that supports what Gladwell is trying to say?

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.

The problem is that Gladwell comes off as trying to be scientific, when really he's just a persuasive storyteller. If you view Gladwell as a purveyor of facts or a science communicator, then he does a horrible job and yes, it's hard to trust whatever he presents because he's at best not very careful about his facts and conclusions. In that case, why would you ever pay attention to him?

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.

The problem with "take it or leave it, it's just a story" is that stories are not neutral, or cost-free. Memes compete for attention/proliferation/survival, and false-but-appealing memes outcompete true-but-boring memes. It's a mini DDOS attack on our collective bandwidth to be churning out durable falsehoods disguised as scientific insight.

Thank you for this comment - you have succinctly captured something that I have been feeling but unable to express in words.

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.

Not just that, but real policy comes out of these books. Gladwell is highly influential among leaders of our bureaucracies. So when it comes time to look at airline safety policies, Gladwell's nonsense about Koreans being too hierarchical to fly safely can worm its way in there.

Haha, yeah, I am reading the book these days, and I clearly remember thinking that those effects seemed really exaggerated.

Isn't that because the replications only looked at a selected subset of all the possible literature? You can be almost sure that if an article's conclusion hinges on a wide interpretation of the experimental result, or the stimuli haven't been sampled properly (and who knows the distribution of stimuli?) or the subjects are first year psych students, and the proof is a rejection of the null hypothesis, that it cannot be replicated. The worst offenders are those that conclude their theory is true because the theory they argue against is rejected.

A fun question especially considering the topic of the thread: are propositions that lack proof necessarily false?

No, but propositions with strong counter-evidence generally are, which is the main topic here. "Not-repicable" generally means "attempted to replicate, but got results inconsistent with the original conclusion."

That is not my understanding of what “not replicable” means. My understanding is “attempted to replicate, but didn’t get any significant results supporting the original conclusion”. There’s nothing that says that the new results are inconsistent with the original findings, only that they couldn’t find any support for them in a similar study.

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.

This is much more correct.

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.

A very good point (I'm not sure if it's relevant to the book in question, as I haven't read it or if you're referring just about the conversation so far). It seems like many people will take a strong claim they are dubious about, and on finding the evidence is sparse, inconclusive, or missing, swing to assuming that statement is false, instead of a more neutral position of "I have no opinion or some reason to think is unlikely, but others think it is unlikely even if poorly supported or unsupported."

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.

> ...are propositions that lack proof necessarily false?

I'll have you know you just nearly nerd sniped a mathematician ;-)

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or, in less dramatic terms, if you cannot reject the null, you should operate on the assumption that the null holds.

If evidence exists (failed studies) of lack of causality, is it a proof that no causality exists?

I suspect I may not be the first person to entertain this question, perhaps there is some literature on the matter.

Of course not, but the more important and difficult questions address how we should reason about, evaluate, and present ideas that lack proof.

Not necessarily false.

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.

Does this particular proposition have no evidence (none is in existence)?

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