Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman ***

For reasons I can’t remember, I didn’t read this pop psychology title at the time of its 2011 publication. (I was really surprised it was that recent - in my mind it was about 20 years old.) Had I done so, I would have loved it. I used to hoover up these books describing all the ways our brains mislead us (even though I found it difficult to remember the vast swathes of different effects and the many biases that were being described). And there’s still a lot to enjoy here. But…

It’s impossible now to read a book like this that is based on a whole host of small and/or poorly sampled experiments without being all too aware of the replication crisis. For example, Kahneman’s chapter on priming has been described as a 'train wreck', based as it is on a set of experiments that have almost all been discredited.

Not only does this concern apply where you happen to know these details, it prompts (surely a psychological effect that Kahneman would be able to write about) suspicion when presented with some findings where I don’t know how good the trial was.

For example, we’re told of an example where participants were presented with two lists of characteristics, three good, three bad. These were applied to two 'people', one with the good attributes listed first, the other leading with the bad ones. Apparently, because of the halo effect, when the good ones were closer to the name, people thought the person was better. But surely this would also apply if people assumed the common convention of putting more significant attributes earlier in a list? There's a reason that questionnaires shuffle up the order of choices when be asked to pick out a few - early ones are given priority. But it's nothing to do with closeness in layout to the thing being considered. You could put the name at the end, after the list of attributes and still get the same effect.

This is an entertaining read of its kind, though, as is often case with a book looking at psychological biases, it covers too many and after a while they get absorbed into a mental mush. But the replication crisis demands a 'start again from scratch, please' rating. I'd be interested to see a new edition taking this into account.

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free hereShort

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog