Michael Lewis describes the King of Human Error, Daniel Kahneman, and his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow:
He was born in 1934 and grew up a Jew in France during the German occupation. His boyhood had been punctuated by dramatic examples of the unpredictability of human behavior and the role of accident in life. His father was captured in a German dragnet that sent many French Jews to die in concentration camps—but then, at the last moment, he was mysteriously released. With his parents and his sister, Danny fled from Paris to the South of France and then to Limoges, where they lived in a chicken coop at the back of a rural pub. One evening he violated the curfew for Jews, and found himself face-to-face in the street with a man in the black uniform of the German SS. The man picked him up and hugged him, then showed him a picture of his own little boy and gave him money. Later in the war, after his family had disguised their Jewish identity, he watched a young Frenchman, a Nazi collaborator and passionate anti-Semite, be well enough fooled by his sister’s disguise to fall in love with her. (“After the Liberation she took enormous pleasure in finding him and letting him know he had fallen in love with a Jew.”) For a time his father held a job, but it was a long bus ride from the chicken coop, and he was away during the week. On weekends Danny and his mother would watch the bus stop from their house, waiting for his father’s bus to arrive. Each time was a cliff-hanger: he knew his father was in constant danger and was never sure that he would come home. “I remember waiting with my mother, and as we waited we darned socks,” he said. “And so darning socks for me has always been an incredibly anxious activity.” His relationship to his father, whom he adored, was further queered by a mere typo; in the phony identity papers his father procured for them there was a mistake. Danny’s last name had been printed as “Godet”; his father’s had been printed as “Cadet.” Because of this typo Danny was required to address his father as “uncle.”
Through it all his father suffered from diabetes, which, after the Germans arrived, went untreated. On the day of his death, in 1944, he took Danny, then 10 years old, out for a walk. “He must have known he was dying,” says Kahneman. “I remember him saying it was now time for me to become the man of the family. I was really angry about him dying. He had been good. But he had not been strong.”
After the war his mother moved the family to what was then Palestine and would soon become Israel, where he became first a platoon commander in the Israeli Defense Forces and then a professor of psychology. It apparently never seriously occurred to him to become anything else. He was always bookish, precocious, and curious about what made people tick. His wartime experience may or may not have heightened his curiosity about the inner workings of the human mind; at any rate, he’s reluctant to give the Germans too much credit for his career choice. “People say your childhood has a big influence on who you become,” he says. “I’m not at all sure that’s true.”
[...]
Kahneman walks the lay reader (i.e., me) through the research of the past few decades that has described, as it has never been described before, what appear to be permanent kinks in human reason. The story he tells has two characters—he names them “System 1” and “System 2”—that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off. We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly. Through these two characters the author describes the mistakes your mind is prone to make and then explores the reasons for its errors.
Jaime Lalinde presents a quiz based on Kahneman’s work. Try it.
Kahneman does interesting work, no doubt. I often see him coupled with his buddy Amos Tversky, in print.
Quiz is far less surprising/fun if one has read N.N.Taleb and especially if one has read G. Gigerenzer.
… and thus we come to political correctness.
I call system 1 the emotional reasoning system because it represents the pre-verbal brain and presents results in terms of pure sensation.
I call system 2 the rational reasoning system, because it’s the obvious name.
Actually, system 1 doesn’t get mislead. Rather, for some reason the executive function belongs to system 2, the rational, and the rational doesn’t instinctively understand system 1, the emotional. However, it thinks it does. So the rational misleads itself about the emotional, and then (in scientists) blames the emotional for getting it wrong.
Verification: simply assume that the emotional is right all the time, and try to figure out how. This cashes out to learning what it’s actually trying to say.
You should find that it never says different things about two otherwise identical situations, noting that the emotional system is right brain leaning and will take absolutely everything into account.
Alrenous reminds me of something. The other day someone asked on the internet:
I answered e) “Screw you” and expounded roughly as follows: