Sign in with Facebook
Richard's Reviews > Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
by Daniel Kahneman
Richard's review
bookshelves: cognition, non-fiction, unfinished, awaiting-review, really-deep-thinking
May 13, 12
bookshelves: cognition, non-fiction, unfinished, awaiting-review, really-deep-thinking
Read from March 24 to April 26, 2012
Okay, yeah, this has to go on the to-be-read shelf. And the over-stuffed cognition shelf. Hey, at least I was reading Kahneman before he won that Nobel Prize, before he got really popular. But I have to admit I never actually finished his Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases — it was due back at the library when I was only halfway through. That is a slow, engrossing grind of an academic tome, though.
All the reviews have been glowing. Kahneman is golden, of course — he's ascended into the pantheon of the intelligentsia's demigods. The first one I read was from The Economist, then there was the one from the New York Times, and then I caught the one in The Wilson Quarterly, but what finally made really this the zeitgeist was when I came across a review in the fluffy “Paper” magazine (I was sitting in a coffeeshop waiting for some friends to finish a boardgame and picked up a free copy. More pop culture snuck into my brain in that twenty minutes than I permitted during the balance of 2011.)
May 8th 2012 Update: The Economist chimes in with an aside: Foreign languages and thinking: Oprima dos for better cognition, in which they report on evidence that some of our cognitive flaws don't seem to interfere when we ponder the decision in a non-native language.
All the reviews have been glowing. Kahneman is golden, of course — he's ascended into the pantheon of the intelligentsia's demigods. The first one I read was from The Economist, then there was the one from the New York Times, and then I caught the one in The Wilson Quarterly, but what finally made really this the zeitgeist was when I came across a review in the fluffy “Paper” magazine (I was sitting in a coffeeshop waiting for some friends to finish a boardgame and picked up a free copy. More pop culture snuck into my brain in that twenty minutes than I permitted during the balance of 2011.)
May 8th 2012 Update: The Economist chimes in with an aside: Foreign languages and thinking: Oprima dos for better cognition, in which they report on evidence that some of our cognitive flaws don't seem to interfere when we ponder the decision in a non-native language.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read Thinking, Fast and Slow.
sign in »
Reading Progress
| 03/27/2012 | page 41 |
|
10.0% | "Yeah, this is a good one. Kahneman's writing style is better than I'd expected." |
| 04/01/2012 | page 199 |
|
47.0% | "My brain hurts — but in a good way." |
| 04/08/2012 | page 255 |
|
61.0% | "Fascinating — but ultimately somewhat depressing. A recurring theme in cognitive science is an assessment that while we can identify the flaws in our thinking, in many important ways we cannot overcome them." |
Comments (showing 1-3 of 3) (3 new)
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Prof.del
(new)
-
rated it 2 stars
Jul 28, 2012 01:44pm
The problem seems to me that you can do another psychological study/ experiment to "prove" the "exact" opposite of one study/experiment.
reply
|
flag
*
It might seem that way, but you're playing games with the word "proof".Science is a collaborative methodology to arrive at a consensus on what is reliable data. The communal aspect is critical — one person, working alone, might very well be doing research, but as long as they are alone, they aren't doing science, and thus aren't "proving" anything scientifically. As much as they might be convincing themselves their hypothesis is correction — and which very well might be — it doesn't achieve the status of scientific proof until the community examines their data and methodology.
This is a perennial confusion in the media, of course. Perhaps it started before the tobacco industry tried to muddy the waters, but that certainly seems to be when folks discovered how easy it was to present people in white lab coats that said whatever was convenient.
Many contrarians aren't bought and paid for, of course, but when the scientific community has achieved consensus on an issue, then it must be tentatively treated as a fact. Very rarely, but sometimes dramatically, one of those mavericks turns out to present a good enough case that the community revisits the idea and changes the "facts". But mavericks are almost always wrong — it's a high-risk proposition to go against the crowd, but the unlikely payoff can be very tempting.
Many folks have trouble with "facts" being arrived at that way, but there is no way for humans to discover the underlying "real" facts. Every time a judge instructs a jury that they are the "triers of fact", they are acting in the same way as the scientific community. For example, here in California, one of the first things a judge reminds a jury is that "You must decide what the facts are in this case." Of course, they're the one's hearing the evidence. In science, the scientists act as the jury. We — society — act as judge, keeping them on the straight and narrow, as it were.
Another useful reminder from the California jury instructions manual —
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you with an abiding conviction that the charge is true. The evidence need not eliminate all possible doubt because everything in life is open to some possible or imaginary doubt.Frankly, I think that could be phrased better, but the scientific parallel is also true: just because someone comes up with a fanciful way that the conclusion might be wrong isn't grounds for throwing up one's hands and deciding no answer has yet been found.
