It’s worth noting that many of the results in Thinking, Fast and Slow didn’t hold up to replication.

It’s still very much worth reading in its own right, but now implicitly comes bundled with a game I like to call “calibrate yourself on the replication crisis”. Playing is simple: every time the book mentions a surprising result, try to guess whether it replicated. Then search online to see if you got it right.

I find that most nonfiction books follow a common structure:

* 1st third of the book: Lays out the basic ideas, gives several examples

* 2nd third of the book: More examples that repeat the themes from the 1st part

* 3rd third of the book: ??? I usually give up at this point

I sometimes wish that more books were like "The Mom Test" - just long enough to say what they need, even if that makes for a short book.

I know Daniel Kahneman only through reading him. Like you, I found Thinking Fast & Slow incredibly useful, first reading it perhaps 10 years ago. Definitely 2014, and I can't believe that's 10 years ago.

I must admit this headline shocked me for the simple reason that... I straight up had no idea that he was so old.

Thank you, Daniel, for the way you've influenced my (and our) thinking in ways that are still impacting us today, both in work and in the rest of life. Rest in peace.

To me the general idea felt as trite and blindingly obvious as any book by Taleb or Gladwell, and about as self-congratulatory. The only thing that surprised me was that he picked the singularly unmemorable names "System 1" and "System 2", instead of something like "intuition" and "reason".

> it covered some generally profound ideas that still are relevant as ever and not widely understood

I've tried to read this book over and over again to understand what everyone is talking about but never found the insights that useful in practice. Like, what have you been able to apply these insights too? What good is it to know that we have a slow mode of thinking and a fast way? Genuine question.

> If you don't have time for that, I'm sure chat GPT can give you a taste of the main premises and you can probe deeper from there.

From gpt4:

The Two Systems: Kahneman introduces the concept of two distinct systems that govern our thoughts. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Heuristics and Biases: The book explains how the fast, intuitive thinking of System 1 leads to the use of heuristics—a kind of mental shortcut that facilitates quick judgments but can also lead to systematic biases and errors in thinking. Kahneman discusses several of these biases, such as the availability heuristic, where people judge the probability of events by how easily examples come to mind, and the anchoring effect, where people rely too heavily on the first piece of information they encounter.

Overconfidence: One of the themes of the book is the confidence people place in their own beliefs and judgments. Kahneman shows that people tend to overestimate their knowledge and their ability to predict outcomes, leading to a greater confidence in their judgments than is warranted. This overconfidence can contribute to risky decision-making and failure to consider alternative viewpoints.

Prospect Theory: Kahneman, along with Amos Tversky, developed Prospect Theory, which challenges the classical economic theory that humans are rational actors who always make decisions in their best interest. Prospect Theory suggests that people value gains and losses differently, leading to decisions that can seem illogical or irrational. It highlights the asymmetry between the perception of gains and losses, where losses are felt more acutely than gains are enjoyed.

Happiness and Well-being: The book also delves into the determinants of happiness and well-being, distinguishing between the experiencing self (which lives in the present) and the remembering self (which keeps score and makes decisions). Kahneman explores how our happiness is influenced more by how life events are remembered than by the actual experience. This leads to some counterintuitive findings, such as people being happier with experiences that end on a high note, regardless of the overall quality or duration of the experience.

It’s the only one of those books I still don’t regret telling people “it’s good” a decade later (with a couple caveats)

I have a physical copy and only read about 2 chapters, after having it for years. I need to take it on a flight to finally get around to reading it. It seems like one of those books you have to own and read at least once.

The Undoing Project is a solid read about his life and work too.

I guess I'm one of the rare folks who started reading TFAS and left without any big revelations or takeaways. I got bored half way through and stopped. Shrug...

Kahneman's book was praised a lot, but I found it more questionable than useful.

It has its good parts, like elaborating on System 1 and System 2, but my favorite concept was regression to the mean. It might by obvious in some cases, but the book made me realize that it applies nearly everywhere.

The bad parts include priming (e.g. the Florida effect) that like others mentioned could not be replicated. He sometimes praises himself for even trivial observations. But my biggest grime that he dismisses Bernoulli's hypothesis in favor of his loss aversion (I still think humans apply a mix of both), while also framing loss aversion as irrational. That is, humans should always only maximize the expected outcome (in terms of money). The reasoning is that during life we will encounter a continuous stream of decisions and maximizing the expected value in each decision will (according to the law of large numbers) maximize the overall income.

It's not (always) irrational. Imagine you have a million dollars. Someone offers you a gamble of a fair coin flip between gaining 2 million dollars and paying one million dollars. With a million USD on your bank account you had a quite comfortable life, and it could get more comfortable with 3 million on your account. But if you lose you are ruined. According to Kahnemann you should take that gamble. Also consider that before the invention of money, those decisions were typically whether to hunt that mammoth or something less aggressive.

The German version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" has a particularity: Your win jumps from € 125.000 to € 500.000 at the 14th question (A consequence of conversion from Deutsche Mark to Euros). Assume you have no idea what the answer is. According to Kahneman you should always pick one at random. If you pick right you get € 500.000. If you pick wrong you will still win € 32.000 or € 500 if you took the 4th lifeline like most contestants do. This makes an expected win of 3/4500 + 1/4500.000 = € 125.375, compared to € 125.000 when you don't answer. Would you do it?

More meta is that, when people in aggregate are stressed and not all that wise or informed, they tend to look for convenience and expediency rather than effort and mastery. Unfortunately, this can also happen when people are apathetic or not stressed and slack off on reasonable skepticism or fail to dig into the details.

Leadership, pride, excellence, empathy, and fairness must not fail into the decay of jingoist buzzwords and remain values with intent and actions that remain unwavering.

The greatest danger is dishonesty when words stop having ordinary meanings, when people stop talking to each other, or when they're a lack of agreement on the obvious intersection of a shared reality.

[flagged]

I was fortunate enough to take a cognitive psych grad seminar from him in the 90s, co-taught by his wife, Anne Treisman. He always seemed given to thinking a little more deeply in the moment than most people do.

One half-joking comment he made about science in the real world vs some idealized notion of it has always stuck with me. In a discussion about whether the results of some paper conflicted with some model or theory of cognition, he mused that scientific progress in psychology (and other non-hard sciences) was really about embarrassing rivals with competing models. No high-level model was ever stated precisely enough to rule out some particular finding; you could always tweak your theory a little to accommodate it. It's just that at some point, you might be too embarrassed to do so.

>was always refreshingly open and honest about that,

His work got torn to shreds with science, what did you expect him to do?

It really should be embarrassing rather than acceptable. It doesnt matter how honest you are AFTER you are caught.

Between the replication crisis and his name on some bad papers, the guy seriously didn't care about correctness as much as interesting-faux-science.

Do you have resources on what specific results did not hold up?

Careful there. By saying "many of the results", you're hand-waving most of the book. The book covers over several decades of his collaborative research with Amos Tversky.

Most of the "underpowered studies" are in the priming-related chapter, called "The Assoviative Machine". The rest of the book is still worth a careful read.

(I had to make this same correction here several years ago. I didn't look up the comment to link it here.)

Wouldn’t the best thing have been to retract the book, or at least to published a revised edition?

FWIW, I believe Kahneman resisted being categorized as an economist and preferred to think of himself as a psychologist.

There's a lot of "magic" in that book where your pre-conceptions are completely subverted.

Don't forget "Noise" it was a great read and great bridge between "Thinking Fast and Slow" with "Nudge"

Sad that Tversky, despite being younger, predeceased him by nearly 3 decades.

Does behavioral economics offer an alternative theory with useful predictions? Like, do we have an option pricing model that holds up better than models coming out of standard theory?

Kahneman's reply was burried deep inside the comment section. Reproduced below for others' convenience:

>> I [Kahneman] accept the basic conclusions of this blog. To be clear, I do so (1) without expressing an opinion about the statistical techniques it employed and (2) without stating an opinion about the validity and replicability of the individual studies I cited.

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. We also cited Overall (1969) for showing “that the prevalence of studies deficient in statistical power is not only wasteful but actually pernicious: it results in a large proportion of invalid rejections of the null hypothesis among published results.” Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message.

My position when I wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was that if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. But the argument only holds when all relevant results are published.

I knew, of course, that the results of priming studies were based on small samples, that the effect sizes were perhaps implausibly large, and that no single study was conclusive on its own. What impressed me was the unanimity and coherence of the results reported by many laboratories. I concluded that priming effects are easy for skilled experimenters to induce, and that they are robust. However, I now understand that my reasoning was flawed and that I should have known better. Unanimity of underpowered studies provides compelling evidence for the existence of a severe file-drawer problem (and/or p-hacking). The argument is inescapable: Studies that are underpowered for the detection of plausible effects must occasionally return non-significant results even when the research hypothesis is true – the absence of these results is evidence that something is amiss in the published record. Furthermore, the existence of a substantial file-drawer effect undermines the two main tools that psychologists use to accumulate evidence for a broad hypotheses: meta-analysis and conceptual replication. Clearly, the experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it. This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through. When questions were later raised about the robustness of priming results I hoped that the authors of this research would rally to bolster their case by stronger evidence, but this did not happen.

I still believe that actions can be primed, sometimes even by stimuli of which the person is unaware. There is adequate evidence for all the building blocks: semantic priming, significant processing of stimuli that are not consciously perceived, and ideo-motor activation. I see no reason to draw a sharp line between the priming of thoughts and the priming of actions. A case can therefore be made for priming on this indirect evidence. But I have changed my views about the size of behavioral priming effects – they cannot be as large and as robust as my chapter suggested.

I am still attached to every study that I cited, and have not unbelieved them, to use Daniel Gilbert’s phrase. I would be happy to see each of them replicated in a large sample. The lesson I have learned, however, is that authors who review a field should be wary of using memorable results of underpowered studies as evidence for their claims.

I think the argument is whether or not we admit we are having these effects and take responsibility for them, we are doing them.

I personally find that telling people exactly what I intend to do makes it more effective rather than less. But in a field where we can change people's behavior by making a button orange instead of blue or presenting a form in one page vs three, I find it impossible to pretend that one of those is a neutral choice.

Instead, I focus on what it is we are maximizing for, and how people feel about the experience. I push my companies to choose patterns that help people feel secure & in control, leading to predictable outcomes that align with what they actually expressed wanting. It means we are collaborating with our users, even though we could have used those same techniques to make them feel more anxious, spend more money than they intended, or buy things they didn't actually need.

Out of both humility and reality, I think even Kahneman would give the bulk of the credit to Amos Tversky.

> The subject was becoming a fairly absurd and dogmatically prescriptivist practice

That was when I was studying it!

So much rubbish "economics is a science because it uses maths" is one favourite of mine.

I did over a decade of study on economics and finance and nobody, even once, mentioned Karl Marx, arguably the most influential economist in the last two hundred years.

It was very prone to fetishes. "Price mechanism" was one I recall. Every problem in society had to be shoe horned into a market so the "price mechanism" would get to work.

Me too, I think a bunch of it was found to be reproducible though.

https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...

Same thing is happening w/ a lot of the work of Dan Ariely, but I think his situation is much worse.

When did you read the book? It seems to me that the ideas within the book now pervade culture in ways that it didn't when it first came out. If you read it recently it could contribute to your feeling of this being common sense. Also because this idea feels like common sense doesn't mean that it was. Evolution is common sense now but it was a revolutionary way to think of species when On The Origin Of Species came out.

I had the same reaction tbh. I managed to get to the end, but it was a slow, tedious slog. And maybe it's because I'd already read a lot of other pop-psych books, but I barely felt like I learned anything new from it.

That aside, I don't doubt that Kahneman was a brilliant mind, and I'm saddened by his passing. RIP.

I couldn't finish this book. It felt like a never-ending stream of examples to illustrate a few simple ideas.

Learned Optimism has a similar style of explaining the author's work over many years in an accessible manner

> some methods of psychlogical and behavoural manipulation

I think you may be objecting to the idea of manipulation here rather than his point. Influence is not necessarily bad, if a dentist notices some poster which causes his patients to floss more shouldn't he keep it up?

Suggesting all manipulation is bad implies we shouldn't do public health education etc if it happens to be effective.

What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve, as they used to say in the pie factory where I worked. But the belly knows. Yes, it's a dangerous, cavalier idea. But from an endlessly complicated and interesting thinker.

“Should” matters little in politics and war. What works for power will be done regardless of your morals. This is how the world works.

Yes. You've noticed that most psychological insights and paradoxes are actually linguistic ambiguities. But it's more fun to ignore that.

Maybe your (anyone's) system 1 might assume only two possible outcomes, but it's not in the question - it's which is more likely, and one option assuredly is, up to a less-than-or-equal sign.

"Which is more likely" isn't a question that commonly has three options. It's a question that commonly has only two options, one of which is more likely than the other.

This aspect was investigated in the literature and broadly speaking, the biases still pop-up: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00350

- It was also touched on in the original paper that Tversky and Kahneman put out https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-03110-001

I read that as assuming that the "bank teller only" answer implied that the person was not a feminist, since most people would assume that being a bank teller does not make you a feminist. In any case, a bad phrasing to give for a survey.... These questions would be better off being as unambiguous as possible.

‘More likely’ to be true doesn’t imply they are the only two options. But pulling out these kinds of assumptions (that you heard that limit when it wasn’t explicitly there) is exactly the kinds of things they were trying to discover, partly to make sure to ask better questions.

FYI, that's been redirected to this post: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841183>

The Chicago School was criticised not only by behavioural economists and psychologists, though, but also by other (fairly orthodox, eg New Keynesian) economists [0]. This is not to distract from Kahneman's monumental contributions (many together with Tversky, as narrated in the book The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis).

[0] see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.htm...

Perhaps Stiglitz, who similarly undermined faith in core neoclassical assumptions?

as an owner of my softbound copy of TF&S I was surprised there wasn't one here already. (I saw the WSJ article drop the minute it posted, as a subscriber.) RIP, Prof. K.

His life is filled with tragedy, like his father dying in Vichy France and his wife preceding his death. Imagine living forever where everyone you know and love dying before you.

Only insofar as it's "kinda weird" to run a service where you notice interesting new things that happen in the world, and then write professional, mostly-reliable words about them, to share with your general audience.

In past centuries, this was a fairly common business model, but I understand the concept sounds pretty jarring to modern ears.

I used to play D&D after school with Tal Tversky and Jon Barwise at the Tversky's Eichler home on the Stanford campus. This was in the early 1980s. I had no idea how famous either of my friend's fathers were (or would become). It's sad how young both of their parents were when they died.

"advance" and "groundbreaking work" is far from enough. Those two basically invented a couple of new sciences.

"Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" is the paper that made them famous, and it's still a damn good read:

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyK...

All of this is in the article.

I know I am nitpicking but Kahneman was not an economist. He was a cognitive psychologist. In fact he is the only psychologist ever to win a Nobel prize in economics.

Nassim Taleb's opinion of others shouldn't hold much sway - the man is a prick.