David Brooks writes in the NYT:
Much of the recent psychological research also suggests that overconfidence is our main cognitive problem, not the reverse. Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” describes an exhaustive collection of experiments demonstrating how often people come to conclusions confidently and wrongly. When asked to estimate if more murders happen in Detroit or in Michigan, most people give higher estimates for Detroit even though every murder in Detroit also happens in Michigan.
The sanctification of psychologist Daniel Kahneman is one of the weirder phenomena of recent years, since it ought to be obvious to everybody that Kahneman's most celebrated shtick is to ask questions that are stupider than people expect him to ask, so they interpret them in a more intelligent fashion than they literally are, and then he says, "Gotcha! I wasn't asking about the per capita murder rate like you assumed I must be, I was asking a dumber question than that. Burn on you!"
I guess it's part of the exaltation of ignorance that's essential to our jihad against prejudice. Here, for example, is Michael Lewis exulting over Kahneman's most famous trick question:
It didn’t take me long to figure out that, in a not so roundabout way, Kahneman and Tversky had made my baseball story [Moneyball] possible. In a collaboration that lasted 15 years and involved an extraordinary number of strange and inventive experiments, they had demonstrated how essentially irrational human beings can be. In 1983—to take just one of dozens of examples—they had created a brief description of an imaginary character they named “Linda.” “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright,” they wrote. “She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”
Then they went around asking people the same question:
Which alternative is more probable?
(1) Linda is a bank teller.
(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.) The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts. Kahneman and Tversky called this logical error the “conjunction fallacy.”
No, it's people assuming that the professors wouldn't be wasting their time with a lot of contrived details simply in order to play a lowbrow trick on them.
This is not to say that Kahneman possesses the self-awareness of a Boy Scout patrol leader hazing the Tenderfeet. Judging from his book, he doesn't really seem to be aware that his questions come out of a long tradition of smart-aleckry and Aspergerness.
This is not to say that Kahneman possesses the self-awareness of a Boy Scout patrol leader hazing the Tenderfeet. Judging from his book, he doesn't really seem to be aware that his questions come out of a long tradition of smart-aleckry and Aspergerness.
the sanctification arises because he 'disproved' the self-evidently bogus assumptions of economic theorists
ReplyDeleteJust assume you are strong enough to push the fatman, and he won't fightback.
ReplyDeleteHadn't heard about this guy until now, but he sounds great. Reminds of me the type of teacher in high school who delights, year after year, in stumping 15 year olds with a stash of trick questions.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Steve, the research is much more sophisticated than the journalistic summaries of it that you are working from, and most of the experimental subjects truly were responding irrationally. In particular, the two choices about Linda being a bank teller (just a bank teller, or a bank teller and a feminist) were two of a list of eight things that were to be ranked in order of likelihood. One proof is that most of the subjects to whom the error was pointed out admitted that they had made an error rather than saying that the meaning of the question was unclear.
ReplyDelete>One proof is that most of the subjects to whom the error was pointed out admitted that they had made an error rather than saying that the meaning of the question was unclear.<
DeleteHow is that a proof?
Steve, you seem to be getting angry. I mean, I got angry when charlatanism started taking off back in the mid-80's, but I thought you were immune.
ReplyDeleteWeird. I read it like this:
ReplyDeleteWhich is more likely?
1. Linda is a bank teller (but is not in the feminist movement)
or
2. Linda is a bank teller (who is in the feminist movement).
Since we must accept her as a bank teller either way, the variable is membership in the feminist movement. Choosing 2. does not negate that she is a bank teller but affirms it, along with affirming that it's more likely that she is a feminist as well.
What's weird is the premise that any part of "she is a bank teller" can conceivably be construed as as logical contradiction of "she is a bank teller." The issue is whether or not she is likely to be a feminist.
Undermining the human mind with brazenly irrational parlor tricks is part of a long tradition. A favorite is perception problems. "Assume an object. You see only one side of it. The side you see is round. So you say the object is round. But how do you know it isn't square on the other sides? You are only seeing it from this side. Therefore don't trust your senses." Of course the right approach is to use your senses even more - by going around to the other sides and looking at them, perhaps feeling them, etc. The solution to all perception problems lies in seeking more perceptual data, not in mistrusting perception as such. These problems prove nothing against perception because they are problems only to the extent perception isn't involved. Kahneman's con doesn't even make that cut; it isn't even worthy of ancient Sophists, who had some inkling that you can't make up your own logic.
Summary: statement 2. is not "logically impossible." Saying statement 2. is "logically impossible" is saying either that "she is a bank teller" contradicts "she is a bank teller" or that "she is active in the feminist movement" contradicts "she is a bank teller" - or it means that we are supposed to pretend the two statements are logically incompatible merely because they are given as separate statements. The last is simply making up one's own logic. Note Lewis's switch from calling them more probable/less probable statements to calling them true/false statements - a parlor trick. These intellectual swindlers do succeed in proving "the essential irrationality of human beings," but not in the way they seem to hope.
Delete"""""""Kahneman's most celebrated shtick is to ask questions that are stupider than people expect him to ask, so they interpret them in a more intelligent fashion than they literally are, and then he says, "Gotcha! I wasn't asking about the per capita murder rate like you assumed I must be, I was asking a dumber question than that. Burn on you!" """"""""""
ReplyDeleteIt also sounds reminiscent of various sections of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, where he asks us to visualize certain words (e.g. black, criminal, etc) and then have us take some weird tests to see if we are confirming our own latent biases or something like that.
Also, he made a point about proclaiming that even though we can go with our first impressions, that sometimes they're right on the money and sometimes not.
But at least he didn't directly ask his readers obviously stupid questions and then attempt to burn them.
Or did he, and without anyone picking up on it?
Obviously, it's an error in the literal sense. Moreover, as Stanley Milgram showed, people aren't all that inclined to challenge Scientists Doing Science.
ReplyDeleteAnd, if you've been only exposed to one or a small number of these trick questions, the pattern isn't obvious. I read "Thinking Fast and Slow" and various patterns became apparent to me, but lots of smart guys like David Brooks and Michael Lewis don't seem to have noticed them. Heck, Freeman Dyson thinks this is hot stuff.
The interesting question is why people evolved to make this literal error. A good follow-up experiment would be to see if individuals diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome do "better" on these questions, normed for IQ, than average.
If Kahneman first did some card tricks, then pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and finally asked his trick questions, he'd probably get different responses than he does when it seems like a sincere science experiment.
ReplyDeleteThis analysis is actually a bit questionable for a couple reasons.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the conjunction fallacy out of every sort of psychological bias and priming effect is rather serious. It also exists among laypeople even when given less stupid questions. It is something that people should be aware of to avoid, and that common laypeople could use some training on.
Second, I'm not sure you quite noticed the methodology that often exists around the studies of the first sort of effect you mention.
What is done, is asking one group of people to estimate the murders in Detroit, and you ask a second group of people to estimate the murders in Michigan (neither group aware of the distinction nor of each other, for all they know the control question is the rabbit population in Idaho.)
With poor sample sizes and p-value fishing this is a problem. Two completely different groups of people giving different mean estimates could be due to random variance, and there's a lot of that whole issue of replication in psychology.
Kahneman himself is a much better researcher and on the right side of many conclusions (in philosophy, perception and so on in particular) compared to most psychologists and social scientists. So IMHO praise for his work is not unreasonable.
Which alternative is more probable?
ReplyDelete(1) Linda is a bank teller.
(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.)
That's incredibly idiotic, assuming the original question did not get mangled in transmission. Number 2 is not "logically impossible". At all. Nor is there anything in the initial premise which would suggest that only one of the two alternatives is possible.
Not only is the guy trying to play clever word games, he's not doing it right.
Kahneman writing on "Linda" (taken from his "Thinking, Fast and Slow"):
ReplyDelete--------------------------------------------------
The best-known and most controversial of our experiments involved a fictitious lady called Linda. Amos and I made up the Linda problem to provide conclusive evidence of the role of heuristics in judgment and of their incompatibility with logic. This is how we described Linda: Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. The audiences who heard this description in the 1980s always laughed because they immediately knew that Linda had attended the University of California at Berkeley, which was famous at the time for its radical, politically engaged students. In one of our experiments we presented participants with a list of eight possible scenarios for Linda. As in the Tom W problem, some ranked the scenarios by representativeness, others by probability. The Linda problem is similar, but with a twist. Linda is a teacher in elementary school. Linda works in a bookstore and takes yoga classes. Linda is active in the feminist movement. Linda is a psychiatric social worker. Linda is a member of the League of Women Voters. Linda is a bank teller. Linda is an insurance salesperson. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. The problem shows its age in several ways. The League of Women Voters is no longer as prominent as it was, and the idea of a feminist “movement” sounds quaint, a testimonial to the change in the status of women over the last thirty years. Even in the Facebook era, however, it is still easy to guess the almost perfect consensus of judgments: Linda is a very good fit for an active feminist, a fairly good fit for someone who works in a bookstore and takes yoga classes—and a very poor fit for a bank teller or an insurance salesperson. Now focus on the critical items in the list: Does Linda look more like a bank teller, or more like a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement? Everyone agrees that Linda fits the idea of a “feminist bank teller” better than she fits the stereotype of bank tellers. The stereotypical bank teller is not a feminist activist, and adding that detail to the description makes for a more coherent story. The twist comes in the judgments of likelihood, because there is a logical relation between the two scenarios. Think in terms of Venn diagrams. The set of feminist bank tellers is wholly included in the set of bank tellers, as every feminist bank teller is0%"ustwora ban0%" w a bank teller. Therefore the probability that Linda is a feminist bank teller must be lower than the probability of her being a bank teller. When you specify a possible event in greater detail you can only lower its probability. The problem therefore sets up a conflict between the intuition of representativeness and the logic of probability. Our initial experiment was between-subjects. Each participant saw a set of seven outcomes that included only one of the critical items (“bank teller” or “feminist bank teller”). Some ranked the outcomes by resemblance, others by likelihood. As in the case of Tom W, the average rankings by resemblance and by likelihood were identical; “feminist bank teller” ranked higher than “bank teller” in both. Then we took the experiment further, using a within-subject design. We made up the questionnaire as you saw it, with “bank teller” in the sixth position in the list and “feminist bank teller” as the last item. We were convinced that subjects would notice the relation between the two outcomes, and that their rankings would be consistent with logic. Indeed, we were so certain of this that we did not think it worthwhile to conduct a special experiment. [continues in another part due to Blogger limit]
[Kahneman, part 2]
ReplyDeleteMy assistant was running another experiment in the lab, and she asked the subjects to complete the new Linda questionnaire while signing out, just before they got paid. About ten questionnaires had accumulated in a tray on my assistant’s desk before I casually glanced at them and found that all the subjects had ranked “feminist bank teller” as more probable than “bank teller.” I was so surprised that I still retain a “flashbulb memory” of the gray color of the metal desk and of where everyone was when I made that discovery.
I quickly called Amos in great excitement to tell him what we had found: we had pitted logic against representativeness, and representativeness had won! In the language of this book, we had observed a failure of System 2: our participants had a fair opportunity to detect the relevance of the logical rule, since both outcomes were included in the same ranking. They did not take advantage of that opportunity. When we extended the experiment, we found that 89% of the undergraduates in our sample violated the logic of probability. We were convinced that statistically sophisticated respondents would do better, so we administered the same questionnaire to doctoral students in the decision-science program of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, all of whom had taken several advanced courses in probability, statistics, and decision theory. We were surprised again: 85% of these respondents also ranked “feminist bank teller” as more likely than “bank teller.” In what we later described as “increasingly desperate” attempts to eliminate the error, we introduced large groups of people to Linda and asked them this simple question: Which alternative is more probable? Linda is a bank teller. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. This stark version of the problem made Linda famous in some circles, and it earned us years of controversy. About 85% to 90% of undergraduates at several major universities chose the second option, contrary to logic. Remarkably, the sinners seemed to have no shame. When I asked my large undergraduatnite class in some indignation, “Do you realize that you have violated an elementary logical rule?” someone in the back row shouted, “So what?” and a graduate student who made the same error explained herself by saying, “I thought you just asked for my opinion.” The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant. Amos and I introduced the idea of a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison. As in the Müller-Lyer illusion, the fallacy remains attractive even when you recognize it for what it is. The naturalist Stephen Jay Gould described his own struggle with the Linda problem. He knew the correct answer, of course, and yet, he wrote, “a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me—‘but she can’t just be a bank teller; read the description.’” The little homunculus is of course Gould’s System 1 speaking to him in insistent tones. (The two-system terminology had not yet been introduced when he wrote.) The correct answer to the short version of the Linda problem was the majority response in only one of our studies: 64% of a group of graduate students in the social sciences at Stanford and at Berkeley correctly judged “feminist bank teller” to be less probable than “bank teller.” In the original version with eight outcomes (shown above), only 15% of a similar group of graduate students had made that choice. The difference is instructive. The longer version separated the two critical outcomes by an intervening item (insurance salesperson), and the readers judged each outcome independently, without comparing them. The shorter version, in contrast, required an explicit comparison that mobilized System 2 and allowed most of the statistically sophisticated students to avoid the fallacy.
More questions for Kahneman to try out on people:
ReplyDeleteThose are very good, but the Linda question is poor even when one knows it's supposed to be a trick. It's a trick question that doesn't work.
DeleteWe grow up being told stories where details are not included at random, but are there for some purpose of the storyteller. So we play along with the storyteller. If the storyteller slathers on a lot of details about Linda's feminist ideology, then we assume either they are there to convey an impression of Linda, or to set up some kind of pleasurable narrative surprise. We don't assume that they are there to waste our time.
ReplyDeleteThere's no reason why Linda has to be a bank teller.
ReplyDeleteThere's no reason why Linda has to be a bank teller AND There's no reason why Linda has to be a feminist (well, there's a .0001% chance she's not a feminist)
So either way...1 restraint or 2 restraints...1 restraint has higher probability because it's only 1
Steve, my favorite teacher used to give us endless math problems with never-ending jumble of worthless facts.
ReplyDeleteI'm a better person because of it :)
I bet Temple Grandin would ace the Linda question.
ReplyDeleteOT: You were the first. You called it. Donald Sterling not rolling over, nothing to lose. Calls out Magic Johns for being a ......SLUT. Says Johnson is trying to steal his team. Will Sterling go further and declare what kind of slut he thinks Johnson is?
ReplyDeleteWhich alternative is a more probable explanation of the point of this story laden with all its details about Linda's college feminism?
ReplyDelete(1) Linda is a bank teller.
(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
There's no point to the story we were subjected to if only (1) is true. It's just an Spergy fact dump.
Kahneman is couching questions in a way that doesn't jibe with people's normal way of perceiving probability. He is using single event probabilities, which one prominent mathematician called meaningless, instead of frequencies. Pinker in his book " How the Mind Works " patiently explains why Kahneman's reasoning is exactly backwards, he is assuming the real world is like a casino where people's intuitive sense fails, because devices there are designed to deliver events independent of their previous history. The casino however is the exception to the real world, not a representation of it, when the same questions are rephrased in such a way as to mimic human's natural heuristics, people get the questions right at over 90 percent accuracy.
ReplyDeleteSteve Sailer is correct, Kahneman is acting like a smug junior high school kid who thinks all the adults around him are morons. Pinker points out he used to reason similarly, WHEN HE WAS A TEENAGER, but that it was he who was reasoning incorrectly and his " long suffering Dad " was right in a debate they had about the weather. His father mentioned after a week of cold, cloudy weather they were due for a cloudless, sunny day. Pinker thought he was committing a gambler's fallacy, but his father was correct. Weather systems are not removed from the Earth at the end of a day and randomly replaced with new ones. The climate is not a roulette wheel where the past is irrelevant to the future. Past behavior of weather system is relevant to predicting it's future behavior, most of the real universe outside of a casino is like that.
I don't know jack about Kahneman's work but the Detroit/Michigan question doesn't seem entirely fair. Detroit does have more murders than Michigan--per capita.
ReplyDeleteSo the question is incoherent but the answer is not--it's just misapplied because it was successfully led astray. The question is irrational and the respondent rational to a fault.
That in a controlled environment he's tripped up by questions the prof and his grad students spent countless hours designing to fool his expectations hardly negates the necessity of this early-developed habit of inferring meaning not properly communicated.
I mean, this is what we do all day engaged in casual conversation with all its sloppiness and idiom. You're asked a question that if read closely makes no sense; you quickly and with a high degree of accuracy recognize intended meaning and answer--sometimes in equally sloppy language--yet the question and answer are both understood. Does the illogic of our language negate the successful communication of information? No.
Hearing the Detroit/Michigan question and I might think I'm being asked to compare how Michigan's murder rate ranks among states to how Detroit's ranks among cities. I'm giving meaning to your stupid question and your ridicule is the thanks I get.
I'm thinking of the Coke v Pepsi taste tests--taking a sip in a controlled environment elicits one response, the real-world another.
Of course, maybe K is taking all this into account and doing interesting things with it. I'll never know. Life is too short.
This focus is really overzealous, again. Laypeople are specifically stupid about probablility in the sense of the conjunction fallacy.
ReplyDeleteThe fact the perhaps a bad example of this is famous per Kahneman does not mean that laypeople are not bad at probability, and in this way.
Consider an example from Wikipedia, one of many, as this finding is robust in the literature. Nonzero numbers of people get stuff like this wrong and do have this bias:
Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequence of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence, from a set of three, and you will win $25 if the sequence you choose appears on successive rolls of the die.
1.RGRRR
2.GRGRRR
3.GRRRRR
The better thing to discuss here, I think, is the fact that laypeople being bad at probability and illustrating Kahneman's general point there (and annoying economists and others, if you wish) doesn't automatically make other psychological research sound either.
That's where criticism is needed. Focusing on the conjunction fallacy overlooks a ton of issues with methodology on other psychological bias, framing, and priming effects, small or skewed samples, and just advancing other research.
statement 2. is not "logically impossible."
ReplyDeleteI noticed that too. I'm embarrassed to admit I spent a minute there trying to figure out just how it's impossible to be both a bank teller and an activist--thinking therein lay the trick. So I guess he really got me on that one!
Yes. The bank teller part cancels, leaving only the feminist part. So the implicit question becomes, is it more likely she is or isn't feminist? Choosing either answer (1) or (2) is rational, but choosing answer (2) seems to be indicated by the fact dump. How all this proves that people are irrational or that there's a logical impossibility somewhere is not explained. We're supposed to take it on faith.
ReplyDelete"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."
ReplyDelete—Anton Chekhov
People have a harder time breaking the rules of narrative than the rules of logic. We watch far more stories on tv and film or in daily life than practice logic.
There appears to be a disconjunction fallacy as well.
ReplyDeleteThese do seem like pretty contrived trick questions. Are there any real world situations where people are making bad decisions due to this kind of reasoning?
ReplyDeleteNo. 2 is logically impossible
ReplyDeleteYes, it's -- formally -- "logically impossible" for 2) to be more "probable" than 1).
Let
a = Linda is a bank teller
and
b = Linda is active in the feminist movement
So the question asked is: Which alternative is more probable?
1) a is TRUE
OR
2) a AND b are both TRUE
I think it's asking a bit much for people to recognize, on the spot, especially after being prejudiced by the description of Linda, that since 2) implies a), choosing 2) means that 1) is always TRUE -- ie has a 100% 'probability' of being TRUE -- whereas 2) will always be less than 100% since no one really knows if Linda is "active in the feminist movement" or not.
It's not clear what this is supposed to prove. Except that if you don't give people enough time to think about something they are more likely to come up with a less than logically perfect answer. But we already know that.
The problem in the US today is that a growing fraction of the population will not be able to come up with the logically appropriate response no matter how much time you give them.
There's some pretty funny stuff on YouTube when one searches 'how dumb are Americans'. In some cases it seems people are just indulging the questioner, others are caught up by these gotcha curveballs, and others are really uninformed. It reinforces the fact that not very much can be expected from at least half of the population. Good for some laughs though.
ReplyDelete>No. 2 is logically impossible
ReplyDeleteI see people being confused about this. It's not saying "Linda is a bank teller and a feminist" is logically impossible.
It's saying "'Linda is a bank teller and a feminist' is more probable than 'Linda is a bank teller'" is logically impossible.
--------
Contra Steve, the conjunction fallacy has been well-known, well-researched, and is damn near as close as fact as can be. The "Linda is a bank-teller" one is the convenient go-to example. You don't see all the other painstaking experiments that have been done to falsify all the objections raised by Steve and by other commenters here.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj/conjunction_controversy_or_how_they_nail_it_down/
It's logically impossible for alternative (2) to be "more probable" than alternative (1). It's obviously not logically impossible for a person to be a bank teller and a feminist.
ReplyDeleteI have a question of my own. Which is more probable?
(1) Michael Lewis sincerely wishes to help people think more rationally?
(2) Michael Lewis wishes to convey the impression that science has proven that stereotypes are irrational?
There are seven apples on the table, three green and four red. Now pay attention: if I take away three green apples and three red apples how many green apples have I got?
ReplyDeleteIf people answer zero, you can triumphantly declare them wrong and "irrational" - I took away three green apples so I've got three green apples!
This is Aristotelian Logic 101. But nobody lives their lives according to Aristotelian Logic 101. If people lived their lives according to Aristotelian Logic 101 in every detail of their lives, not only would nothing get done, but no one would take extra precautions on anything. Rather, people live their lives according to Bayesian probability, which, as other comments have pointed out, does indeed mean that contextual features change the likelihood that something is the case.
ReplyDeleteAs a rock climber, I pride myself on being not only extra Bayesian about things when I'm outside, but sometimes completely irrational. There's only a tiny probability that certain rocks will break lose, but 100% of the time, I don't anchor to those rocks when I see them. That's because if the tiny probability turns out to be the case in my case then I'm 100% dead.
The probability that Linda is:
ReplyDelete(1) A bank teller and a feminist OR that Linda is a bank teller and not a feminist
is always going to be greater than the probability that Linda is
(2) a bank teller and a feminist.
Of course, if the original question had been which alternative is more probable?
(1) Linda is a bank teller and not a feminist
(2) Linda is a bank teller and a feminist
Then it would be deeply irrational to choose (1) over (2) or to claim either alternative is just as likely.
Ding Ding Ding!
ReplyDeleteeah at 2:52 AM wins the round
One could always answer a Kahneman, "Screw your question, pal. A big ole sexist like me is interested in one thing: is it more likely Linda is a feminist than that she's not? Based on what you said about her only a idiot could conclude it's less likely that she's a feminist!"
ReplyDeleteWow, you're way, waaay off-base on this one.
ReplyDeleteKahneman is a brilliant scientist, and his work on bias has immense validity in the real world. In your examples, these aren't "trick" questions, they're probabilities translated into narrative. The bank teller question seems trite but it's a simplified example of scenarios that happen constantly. And guess what? The probability of X will always be greater than the probability of (X+1), no matter how interesting or salient that +1 can be. The point is most people are TERRIBLE at assigning probabilities -- a cornerstone of rational thinking. Further, I'd bet that if the answers were sorted by subjects' IQ (god forbid someone looks into that), then we'd see a correlation.
I expect the next thing I'll see here is that Kahneman's research is a Jewish plot to confuse the White Race or something like that. LOLOL!
Prof. Kahneman is a shrewd, cunning old fellow who likes to trick students into obvious but technically wrong answers to stories he made up. On Christmas, he enjoys going to a Chinese restaurant in Princeton, NJ for an early dinner, and then taking in a Spielberg or Mel Brooks movie. In his younger days, he helped to train Israeli Air Force pilots. Is Professor Kahneman:
ReplyDeleteA. A professor.
B. A Jewish psychology professor emeritus at Princeton.
The answer is A, you irrational anti-semite.
Good grief. Yes, we know how the logic works, and that A&B can't be more likely than A. Steve's point is that if someone answers the question incorrectly, it doesn't mean he's a logical ignoramus who really thinks that finding a nickel and then a dime is more likely than finding a nickel. It could simply mean that a normal, non-aspie person, answering a question asked by another human being, tries to take all the context into account, including the possible reasons for the asking. Someone might answer it one way on a math test while answering it another way during a group discussion in sociology class. When dealing with humans, we try to anticipate intentions, which sometimes means passing up the obvious answer.
ReplyDeleteIf you're a good test-taker, you know that there are several ways to get a question right, especially in multiple choice. Ideally, you know the correct answer. If not, maybe you can eliminate the wrong answers. But when that fails, I've gotten a lot of questions on tests right by thinking about who is asking the question and what sort of answer he would be likely to choose.
Most people are bad at logic, but that's not all that's going on here.
Kahneman's work and behavioral economics generally is valuable. But the way it's often presented to the public is "science proves stereotypes/discrimination is irrational!", which is total bs.
ReplyDelete"No, it's people assuming that the professors wouldn't be wasting their time with a lot of contrived details simply in order to play a lowbrow trick on them."
ReplyDeleteThis is true to some extent. But many people really really really are dim.
It's like fans of Rush Limbaugh.
Chicoms are bad but Walmart is good.
Where do Walmart products come from?
It all depends on how debates are framed.
ReplyDeleteWhen Madoff did what he done,
the debate wasn't framed in terms of 'Jews should be more mindful of corruption in their community' but in terms of 'what if this leads to antisemitism'?
So, the moral burden was placed on gentile community when Madoff was one of the many many Jewish crooks on Wall Street.
Jews have the power to frame debates, and the framing of debates/questions favor certain conclusions.
And on the issue of Russia, it's incredible what American dummies think. Especially American dummy conservatives. They stand with Jews against Russia on the very issues Jews use against American conservatives.
Jews to American conservatives:
"you are homophobic racist xenophobic trash".
American conservatives to Jews:
"we will stand with you against homophobic racist xenophobic Russian trash".
Any wonder why American conservatives are the most pathetic idiots in the world? They get their talking points from neocon talk radio clowns while Liberal Jews bash them night and day.
If American conservatives were logical and honest, they'd realize that Liberal Jews bash them night and day. THEREFORE, Jews are their main enemy since most Jews--especially powerful Jews--are Liberal.
BUT because neocons control American conservative media, they instruct American conservatives to love Jews and serve Jews in a culture and political war against Russia that embraces conservative values.
And dummy American conservatives fall for this shtick.
Dummies.
Can't have it both ways Steve. Malcolm Gladwell based 'Blink' on the work of Kahneman's main academic opponent, Gerd Gigerenzer.
ReplyDeleteKahneman can't understand anyone expecting social science professors would NOT give them irrelevant and misleading information. So, irony and snark aside, who is the naive one, eh?
"No. 2 is logically impossible"
ReplyDeleteI see people being confused about this. It's not saying "Linda is a bank teller and a feminist" is logically impossible."
Oh, for Gods sake. Using the degree of hairsplitting language parsing which Kahneman himself is using, then saying that "No. 2 is logically impossible" (where "No. 2" is shorthand for the statement "Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement") is identical to saying "The statement that 'Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement' is logically impossible".
And it isn't. Statement No. 2 is most certainly logically possible.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteI expect the next thing I'll see here is that Kahneman's research is a Jewish plot to confuse the White Race or something like that. LOLOL!
Your claim is that the fact that Kahneman's schtick is going around "proving" goys have goyische kopf is unrelated to his Jewishness? Seriously?
Is, say, Yudkowsky's curious tendency to call the Blessed Virgin Mary a whore while explicating his atheism also unrelated to his Jewishness?
The real lesson of Kahneman's games is that if you ask people deliberately stupid questions, especially if you are somebody who is supposed to be smart and who they cannot very well respond to with "Your question is stupid", they will attempt to interpret your stupid question in such a way as to make it intelligible.
ReplyDeleteIt's too bad Kahneman is not intelligent enough to understand that, as it says something more useful and interesting about the human mind than does his own theorizing.
Cail Corishev said...
ReplyDeleteGood grief. Yes, we know how the logic works, and that A&B can't be more likely than A. Steve's point is that if someone answers the question incorrectly, it doesn't mean he's a logical ignoramus who really thinks that finding a nickel and then a dime is more likely than finding a nickel. It could simply mean that a normal, non-aspie person, answering a question asked by another human being, tries to take all the context into account, including the possible reasons for the asking. Someone might answer it one way on a math test while answering it another way during a group discussion in sociology class. When dealing with humans, we try to anticipate intentions, which sometimes means passing up the obvious answer.
Exactly. Go and read a transcript of a normal human conversation sometime. It looks nothing like dialogue in a book. The people are constantly saying apparently wrong, incoherent, nonsense things which the other conversation partner understands perfectly. Every sentence a fragment. Every thought incomplete. Every claim false. Etc. Humans are good at "fixing" the defective speech of others.
Building precise logic systems is a spergy pass-time. Precise logical systems are not intuitive to anyone, except smart spergs with lots of training. That such systems have some uses here and there does not establish that they are the sina qua non of cognition.
Some of us smart spergs figure this out in our twenties. Some do not. The spergs taken in by Danny Boy's schtick are more defective than the schlubs "failing" his tests.
How's that "no hot hand" retardation working out for ole Danny Boy?
@Antioco Dascalon...
ReplyDeleteThat Chekhov quote is brilliant and sums up the situation nicely. Thank you.
David: It is an easy question to misunderstand, and I think you have (as I once did) fallen into the trap.
ReplyDelete"Lisa is a bank teller" does not mean "Lisa is a bank teller who is NOT a feminist," it means "Lisa is a bank teller who may or may not be a feminist." Since 1 includes 2, it cannot be less probable than 2.
Ask a group of heterosexual men "Do you find women attractive?" and they'll all say yes.
ReplyDeleteThen you could respond "So you find Nancy Pelosi attractive, eh? After all, you said you find women attractive and she is in fact a member of the category "women", isn't she? So logically .."
At which point, hopefully, one of the men will punch you in the nose for being an ass.
just had this idea. these people who are obsessed with exposing assumptions and biases (real and imaginary, useful and not) basically are unahppy that the low-context culture of America isn't low-context enough.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_context_culture
thinking that everything must be explicit, I dunno, is this Freudianism? but the fact is, someone wants us all be like Data from Star Trek
ReplyDeleteThe economist John Kay suggested a few years back that cognitive illusions are no more of an issue in everyday life than optical illusions; 'in the wild' they are rare and fleeting phenomena that vanish with a slight change of perspective.
ReplyDeleteHowever, that reckons without people deliberately trying to set us up in situations to exploit our cognitive biases in order to get money out of us. Much of the innovation of US and UK businesses in the last few decades seems to have involved ('MBAs with spreadsheets') making more confused and compliant customers rather than making better products.
(Also, cognitive illusions illuminate some of our reasoning processes, just as optical illusions illuminate our processes of perception, hence the scientific interest of Kahneman et al's research.)
"It is an easy question to misunderstand, and I think you have (as I once did) fallen into the trap."
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that the question is explicitly designed to be a trap. It's intended to be misunderstood.
I'm Rushin, and (some) Rushins, from what I know, do speak in movie quotes and poets' quotes, and one must actually have watched the movie/read the poet to "get it." so russia I'd say is (relatively) high-context.
ReplyDeletebut then for example McWhorter in "The Power of Babel" says that foreigners (Germans) don't "get" "Married... With Children" the way Americans do because they've never watched the American family sitcoms it parodies and that the German dubbing of Southpark is "witless by our standards because the show is so profoundly rooted in subtly ingrained aspects of our particular pop culture and our layered relation to it", so America is high-context, too?
Anyway, thank you Steve for exposing the BS-ers and the self promoters and the sheer surrealism of the mainstream opinion on certain subjects
The point is most people are TERRIBLE at assigning probabilities -- a cornerstone of rational thinking.
ReplyDeleteMost people may or may not be terrible at calculating probabilities. You can't arrive at a conclusion either way based on their answers to the deliberately deceptive "Linda" question. Any such conclusion would be irrational.
At which point, hopefully, one of the men will punch you in the nose for being an ass
ReplyDeleteBravo!
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Grice#Conversational_implicature
ReplyDeleteSorry, Steve, you're just wrong. People make the error when the questions are asked separately, so they cannot be "intelligently" converting bank teller into non-feminist bank teller. Kahneman would not accomplished anywhere near as much if he was just making jokes. He didn't merely find THAT people get wrong answers, but HOW, by examining errors through multiple angles in different experiments.
ReplyDeleteIt's always been obvious that average people can be fooled by all sorts of tricks and that they have problems when when it's not a trick.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm particularly interested in elite errors and biases. Here we have a Nobel Prize winner whose work is being celebrated by David Brooks and Michael Lewis, and none of them, after all these years, seem to understand what's wrong with these famous questions. That's very curious. I mean, Michael Lewis knows a thing or two about storytelling, yet he was unable to reframe the Linda experiment as a problem involving storytelling. Very strange.
There's nothing wrong with the questions. The heuristics that normal people use to deal with the world also cause them to fail at tasks involving rational thinking outside of certain contexts.
ReplyDeleteConsider the Wason selection task. It's been demonstrated that if you ask people to solve the problem with numbers on cards, they usually fail. But present them with the same problem with people at a bar, the rate of correct answers goes way up.
Human beings aren't designed to be intuitively good at dealing with abstractions. They're designed to successfully deal with other irrational human beings. There's an important measurement of the ability to deal with abstraction regardless: it's called 'IQ'.