Background material for reading Judgment Under Uncertainty?
post by Tesseract · 2011-06-25T02:24:41.353Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 1 commentsContents
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After seeing it constantly referenced in the Sequences and elsewhere, I've picked up Kahneman and Tversky's book/collection of papers Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. I was wondering if anyone here who's read it or knows the subject would recommend any prefatory material so that it makes more sense/is more meaningful.
Personal background: [Personal information deleted] From that and from this site, I'm passingly familiar with e.g. the representativeness heuristic and Bayesian probability, but I've never had to use it much in any academic setting.
Any advice before I delve into it?
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comment by gjm · 2011-06-25T18:05:12.594Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
For what it's worth, I found it very approachable without any particular preparation. (My background: mathematics PhD, some years doing applied mathsy things in industry, and lots of general scientific reading.) If you don't have a reasonably firm grasp on probability and very basic statistics, that's worth acquiring (not just to read Kahneman and Tversky -- it's worth having anyway). I don't think you need a lot of detailed psychological knowledge; and the key points about heuristics, biases and all that are provided in the book itself.
I'd suggest that you just dive in and see for yourself what's more difficult than it seems like it should be.
(The other of their series of three books that I've read ("Heuristics and biases") I found less approachable, I think largely because it seemed more finickily technical -- the fundamentals had already been presented in JUU, after all. I haven't looked at "Choices, values and frames".)