Daniel Kahneman has died

post by DanielFilan · 2024-03-27T15:59:14.517Z · LW · GW · 11 comments

This is a link post for https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/27/daniel-kahneman-dead/

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He was 90 years old.

His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor for the New Yorker. She did not say where or how he died.

The obituary also describes an episode from his life that I had not previously heard (but others may have):

Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv on March 5, 1934, while his mother was visiting relatives in what was then the British mandate of Palestine. The Kahnemans made their home in France, and young Daniel was raised in Paris, where his mother was a homemaker and his father was the chief of research for a cosmetics firm.

During World War II, he was forced to wear a Star of David after Nazi German forces occupied the city in 1940. One night in 1941 or ’42, he later recalled, he stayed out past the German-imposed curfew for Jews while visiting a friend, and he turned his sweater inside out to hide the star while he walked a few blocks home. He then crossed paths with a soldier in the SS, who called Daniel over, picked him up — and hugged him.

“I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater,” Dr. Kahneman noted in a biographical essay for the Nobel Prize ceremonies. But the German pulled out his wallet, showed him a photo of a boy, gave him some money and sent him on his way. “I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right,” Dr. Kahneman said in the essay. “People were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

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