The few times I've tried to read Kahneman's book I must admit that I stopped pretty early. I found his writing style too authoritative, without presenting much evidence for the theories he lays out.
I can see where you might feel this way. I recommend giving it another try and come at from two considerations. The first is observing their experimental designs. They are very clever and well described. The second is the extent to which these experiments have been replicated with consistent results using populations with a range of socioeconomic and cultural differences.
Given the consistency of these experimental outcomes, may help to explain his authoritative tone. After all, he won a Nobel prize in economics which is completely outside his domain expertise.
If that is not enough to entice you to give it another go, consider the book, The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis. Lewis, in his highly researched and using detailed anecdotes describes how Kahnemans and Tversky collaboration initially began as a collaboration around understanding the decision making process in circumstances where there is a high degree of uncertainty and acquiring additional information is not feasible. The Khanamen/Tversky collaboration is described as a deep collaboration where neither man claims credit for their respective contributions. Only both minds together could have produced their research findings.
Lewis also describes how many reviewers of his book, Moneyball, expressed the many parallels between Kahnemans/Tversky's research and themes covered in Moneyball. Lewis was not familiar with this research when he wrote Moneyball. It was not until others pointed out these parallels that Lewis decided he should engage with Kahneman to write The Undoing Project.
Given that this is what he had to say on priming, the authoritative tone starts sounding a little less authoritative: "When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief . . . The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."
I agree completely. If you take everything in the book as 100% gospel, it will let you down. However, there are lots of perspective changing things to learn. I particularly learned a lot about anchoring and reacting vs thinking.
Well, afterall, he is an authority, and too much evidential detail likely would detract from his goal to help the general public improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgement and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them.
You might prefer his scholarly writings over those intended for a general audience:
And you're well served with this response, as the actual work he did is basically not reproducible. No matter how many best selling books made into movies; it's still bullshit.
I believe this is overstated and makes it sound like all of his work is bs, when the majority of the book is just fine.
(I could be wrong and would be happy to be proven so. Just not a fan of the all-or-nothing attitude people apply toward this book when that doesn't seem warranted.)
If some data is wrong and you can't tell which is which, how can you trust just some parts of this book? Are we to fact-check bit by bit until everything gets sorted out and we know for sure what parts of the book to trust?
Besides, why go through all that trouble if there are heaps of good psychology books out there that aren't plagued with errors as this one? Since our time is so limited, I think it is a good heuristic to avoid any non-fiction book that it is known to contain errors.
Your complaints aren't unreasonable, and I wouldn't disagree with skipping the book to read others instead. I agree with whoever said the book needs a version 2.
However, I don't think this justifies dismissing the entire book. "I'm not sure which studies weren't reproducible and I don't feel like looking them up," is a very different statement than, "This whole book is bullshit." There's really no reason to make that latter overstatement.
If some data is wrong and you can't tell which is which, how can you trust just some parts of this book?
That's kind of the same problem that a psychology researcher faces; some of their data is going to be wrong.
The question winds-up being how "robust" your claim is, can you survive having some points being wrong? For Thinking Slow And Fast, the robustness of the claims is kind of a mixed bag imo.
> why go through all that trouble if there are heaps of good psychology books out there that aren't plagued with errors as this one?
All of psychology has suffered in the replication crisis, but my understanding is that Kahneman & Tversky's stuff is better than most. Their work was mostly solid and in a different era. The real bullshit began in the era of celebrities doing TED talks.
Edit it would be better for me to distinguish Kahneman & Tversky's own work from the work of others described in the book. Eg there is stuff in the book on priming which is definitely TED-era and doesn't replicate.
I feel like there are two ways you can take a book like Thinking Slow And Fast; One is that there are variety of mental processes, some faster than others, some more conscious than other, etc. The other is that there's a hard distinction between "the" slow process and "the" fast process.
If you take with the first implication, it's plausible, useful as one more datum. But it seems like replication problems make the hard distinction approach more problematic.
> The other is that there's a hard distinction between "the" slow process and "the" fast process.
I've yet to read the book, but I've listened to him on several podcasts, and I've never gotten the sense that he wouldn't see it as a continuum, didn't he even say something early in the interview that the "1 & 2" is more of a metaphor? (his answer to that question starts at 9:00). System 1 is trainable, for example, and I can't imagine he'd suggest that isn't highly dimensional.
As far as I understand it, only a small part of his book is based on distrusted research (and was that even his work or did he just write it up? Cannot remember).
Most of the book is still considered correct.
Plus, he readily admitted to the faulty parts and made a very strong request to the affected research teams to clean up their act and pretty much re-do all experiments multiple times, by multiple labs, with external oversight.
The things Kahneman worked on himself all did pretty well out of the replication crisis as far as I can tell. The fact that his findings got so much pushback when introduced probably helped a lot with making them more rigorous. And Kahneman didn't dig in his heels when the crisis hit. But there is an awful lots of stuff that needs to be expunged from his book because it was based on what turned out to be bad science.
> But there is an awful lots of stuff that needs to be expunged from his book because it was based on what turned out to be bad science.
Can you give an example of this? I haven't seen anything he said in here that fundamentally needs to rest on a theory that could be the outcome of some study, but maybe I'm interpreting somehow differently.
You are making a sweeping generalization of the entire book.
Bear in mind: As has been repeatedly pointed out, it is only the priming-related chapter (called 'The Associative Machine' in the book) that put "too much faith in under-powered studies". Not the entire book!
The book is a synthesis of forty years of Kahneman's research and his collaboration with his late colleague, Tversky. A wide range of topics are covered; and it still absolutely merits reading. Patiently dive into the book and make up your mind.
(And yes, a v2 of this book definitely is worth it, given the "authority" of the Nobel Memorial Prize.)
I've heard something similar here on HN before (still didn't read the book myself), and what baffles me: wasn't he awarded the Nobel Prize for that work? Are those just political bullshit nowdays as well, like Oscars?
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (in memoriam of Alfred Nobel); not The Nobel Prize. Economics is mostly a set of shaggy dog stories in service of ideology, rather than a branch of legitimate scientific inquiry. I mean Paul Krugman won the same prize; he appears to be have a Brier score of 1 on his predictions.
Etymology and history aside, important quote from Wikipedia is:
> it is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation
So, for all intents and purposes it kinda is "the Nobel Prize in Economics". If they don't give a fuck about legitimacy of it, I don't see why they would care for the rest of "Nobel Prizes".
No, it really isn't "the Nobel Prize in Economics" which is why it has a different name, and the Nobel family want to get rid of it. It should be emphasized that it is a nonsense Nobel and economics a nonsense subject every time it is brought up.
However, this BuzzFeed article has itself been critiqued for strawmanning "mindset theory" and not highlighting some of the meta-analyses that have given evidence to the theory of "growth mindset". Source: https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/mindset-theory-a-popular-idea...
As a footnote, I will say two quick things: first, I've found the theory of "growth vs. fixed mindset" in helping me challenge myself in areas I may otherwise not have. Second, on the other hand I have worked full-time in a high school as a CS teacher and we discussed growth mindset quite often in this school. Many students became "immune" to the idea and rolled their eyes at it to the point of making it a meme around the school.
Just to piggyback off of this comment, from anecdotal experience as a high school teacher, I found the portion of the replication quoted in Margin Revolution to be quite true:
"… as expected, average effects were small because many students are already doing well, do not have motivational issues, or are not in environments that encourage or support growth-mindset behaviors. When we take account of such factors, more noteworthy effects emerge. The improvements in the gateway outcome of 9th grade GPA were concentrated among adolescents who are at significant risk for compromised well-being and economic welfare: those with lower levels of prior achievement attending relatively lower achieving schools. The finding that an intervention can redirect this adolescent outcome in this sub-group, in under an hour, without training of teachers, and at scale (i.e. in a random sample of nation’s schools), represents a significant advance."
Personal experience lines up with the result that lower-achieving students may benefit more from the "growth mindset" idea than others. For instance, I did notice that messaging I gave to students with a "fixed mindset" towards studying CS/math seemed to improve motivation, work ethic and interest over the course of a semester.
I had to put it down at around 30% but not for your same reason, but because I just found it badly redacted (boring for me to keep going). However, I believe that the info is quite compelling and useful, but might need another style.
Given the consistency of these experimental outcomes, may help to explain his authoritative tone. After all, he won a Nobel prize in economics which is completely outside his domain expertise.
If that is not enough to entice you to give it another go, consider the book, The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis. Lewis, in his highly researched and using detailed anecdotes describes how Kahnemans and Tversky collaboration initially began as a collaboration around understanding the decision making process in circumstances where there is a high degree of uncertainty and acquiring additional information is not feasible. The Khanamen/Tversky collaboration is described as a deep collaboration where neither man claims credit for their respective contributions. Only both minds together could have produced their research findings.
Lewis also describes how many reviewers of his book, Moneyball, expressed the many parallels between Kahnemans/Tversky's research and themes covered in Moneyball. Lewis was not familiar with this research when he wrote Moneyball. It was not until others pointed out these parallels that Lewis decided he should engage with Kahneman to write The Undoing Project.