[Link] Less Wrong Wiki article with very long summary of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow

post by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-11-22T16:32:44.105Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 14 comments

Contents

14 comments

I've made very extensive notes, along with my assessment, of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, and have passed it around to aspiring rationalist friends who found my notes very useful. So I though I would share these with the Less Wrong community by creating a Less Wrong Wiki article with these notes. Feel free to optimize the article based on your own notes as well. Hope this proves as helpful to you as it did to those others whom I shared my notes with.

 

 

14 comments

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comment by [deleted] · 2015-11-23T00:44:47.228Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That summary is 100 pages long (31,547 words). I'd recommend trimming it down. I hadn't looked into this much before, but was quickly able to find a study repeating my concerns:

All these theories have in common the distinction between cognitive processes that are fast, automatic, and unconscious and those that are slow, deliberative, and conscious. A number of authors have recently suggested that there may be two architecturally (and evolutionarily) distinct cognitive systems underlying these dual-process accounts. However, it emerges that (a) there are multiple kinds of implicit processes described by different theorists and (b) not all of the proposed attributes of the two kinds of processing can be sensibly mapped on to two systems as currently conceived.

- Jonathan St. B.T. Evans

I haven't read the book, but the dual-processing theory itself comes across to me as tautological. I look at the evidence often presented and think they're arguing: if somebody gets the right answer, they must either be using System 2, or the right answer must be a part of System 1. If somebody gets the wrong answer, they must not be using System 2. Just skimming your review, I got the impression you were just attempting to describe the book, and not being very critical of its arguments. In particular, I couldn't find any discussions of the empirical evidence. What do you think are the most important studies which either support or hurt this theory? What sort of studies do you think need to be performed to really say whether this is a good accounting of human reasoning? What would cause you to decide this theory is wrong?

Replies from: Gleb_Tsipursky
comment by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-11-23T00:59:42.313Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My purpose was to provide my long summary, not a review :-) I think there's lots of interesting stuff from Stanovich and others on alternative ways of depicting human thinking processes. Not saying Kahneman is right or wrong. Just wanted to share my notes for the benefit of the community. If it was a review, I wouldn't have posted it on the wiki itself.

comment by [deleted] · 2015-11-22T21:55:37.018Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is the formatting messed up? You've got a ten-page paragraph in there.

Replies from: Gleb_Tsipursky
comment by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-11-23T00:13:00.282Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for catching the formatting issues! Fixed it :-)

Replies from: ScottL, Richard_Kennaway
comment by ScottL · 2015-11-23T02:07:45.322Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would recommend that you change the formatting to be the following: ' list item', '* sublist item', '==header item==' and '===subheader item==='.

Replies from: Gleb_Tsipursky
comment by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-11-23T06:47:49.209Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Will do it when I have the time, or someone who is interested can do so in the meantime.

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway, Richard_Kennaway
comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2015-11-23T09:12:56.367Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You had time to write over 30 thousand words, and no time to fix the formatting?

someone who is interested can do so in the meantime.

I predict that this will not happen.

comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2015-11-23T09:14:46.332Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You had time to write over 30 thousand words, and no time to fix the formatting so that it can be read?

someone who is interested can do so in the meantime.

I predict that this will not happen.

Replies from: John_Maxwell_IV, Gleb_Tsipursky
comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2015-11-24T05:16:07.686Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm guessing he only created a LW wiki article as an afterthought. Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we punish people for making imperfect contributions we likely won't get any contributions at all.

Replies from: Gleb_Tsipursky
comment by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-11-24T16:32:50.566Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks!

comment by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-11-24T16:32:44.343Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I wrote over 30000 words for myself when I was reading and summarizing it. I then shared my notes with friends who were aspiring rationalists but didn't have time to read the book. They were blown away by my notes, and strongly encouraged me to share them publicly with the LW community.

This is what I did with the LW Wiki article, taking the time to upload my notes, format them, and reformat them based on requests. To answer your point below, the article appears to me to right now be mostly bullet points and short paragraphs. I'm using Firefox, don't know about how it comes out on other browsers.

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway
comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2015-11-24T20:08:33.827Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I see more bullet points and short paragraphs now (in both Safari and Firefox), but after "Longer summary" it reverts to a wall-o-text per chapter.

Replies from: Gleb_Tsipursky
comment by Gleb_Tsipursky · 2015-11-24T21:15:55.207Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yup, wall of text per chapter. Don't have time to spend more on editing it now :-)

comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2015-11-23T09:09:00.254Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I still see 90% of the article as a single paragraph. However you're doing bullet points, it isn't working.