[csallen]

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.)

[henriquemaia]

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.

[csallen]

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.

[joe_the_user]

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.

[jmmcd]

> 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.

[joe_the_user]

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.

[mistermann]

> 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.