[eldavido]

This is a fantastic book. It's essentially a summary of the author (Daniel Kahneman's) academic career, worth reading because he's one of the founders of "behavioral economics" - the idea that economic-decision making should be studied using real people and experiments--how they do it in psychology--rather than a bunch of mathematical models on a blackboard which may or may not accurately capture human behavior (despite being mathematically usable/tractable).

If you read this book, you'll learn how absurdly influential Kahneman has been: he did the original research on the endowment effect, anchoring, loss aversion, and tons of other stuff you'll see quoted around here all the time. He's also heavily cited by Taleb.

I wish more academics would write like this. It's a hard book to summarize because it's long and completely free of bullshit. It's more or less 400 pages of "here's the question, here's what we did, here were the results, we were surprised because" 20-30 pages at a time. It's an outstanding book by an outstanding professor.

[icebraining]

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...

[kashyapc]

Although the book still has tremendous value (FWIW, I've read it too), I hope more people also read the above blog (& the comment on it by Kahneman himself), to keep a balance of perspectives and the current "replication crisis" in psychology studies.

Kahneman writes:

[quote] What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. As pointed out in the blog, and earlier by Andrew Gelman, there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. [/quote]

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228712