I’ve always felt it’s unfair that people attribute the “System 1/System 2” dual-reasoning idea to KT. Their research was mostly behavioral, and many of their classic psychology experiments (Linda problem, law of small numbers, representativeness bias, etc.) never mentioned two systems. The dual-process framework only emerged around the 2000s in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Jonathan Evans, Keith Stanovich), which later provided brain-based evidence for it.
When the book came out, KT basically retrofitted their earlier behavioral work into this newer two-system framework. The book made the distinction famous, but that wasn’t really KT’s original contribution. Their biggest impact was bringing psychology into economics, i.e., prospect theory, alternative utility functions, and ultimately the creation of behavioral economics. I think people often don’t give enough credit to what they actually pioneered, and instead celebrate them for concepts they didn’t really originate.
I also find it funny when they attribute to Kahneman the very observation that people sometimes decide instinctively and sometimes not. It's like some kind of science-washing.
Thinking evolved in creatures only to help correlate the past to future, using some memory from the past. The correlations and responses gradually get codified into instincts and genes to help bypass the thinking, which is costly and slow.
Human thinking is considered a bad situation if the thinking goes beyond what's immediately needed, or if it makes the mind unavailable to process inputs from the senses. Any person who is lost in thought is in reality suffering from a lack of coordination between their body and mind, as their mind is no longer serving their body. It is not unusual that thinking considered same as worrying, as it indicates that person is unable to process information or concerned about something.
There's no way for evolution to read the history of how an organism responded to something and codify it into an instinct. All it can operate on is whether the organism reproduced. If a tendency to mull things over made the organism survive, that's what gets codified, not the actions it chose.
The whole advantage of thinking is being able to select adaptive responses to situations that change too rapidly for evolution to ever hard code as instincts.
The history of an individual organism can be read by future generations. But it's through epigenetics, not genetics - adding methyl groups to the helix structure that influence gene expression. These are inherited, but the changes only last a few generations and have limited (though not zero!) impact on evolution.
Beyond that, culture has a huge role to play. Many complex lifeforms learn how to survive from their parents and peers. Those groups with less adaptive strategies will be wiped out. For many organisms, they are not "thinking" per se, they are processing sensory data in the way they've been taught. The "thinking" was done by multilevel selection, weeding out ineffective strategies.
IOW, no organism technically needs to think through a problem from first principles. There's always some cultural heuristic to fall back on.
Second paragraph is spot on. The search space is far too large for evolution to provide direct solutions for every challenge a multicellular lifeform could face. General solutions rule. But it's likely that cultural adaptation plays a larger role than individual cognition.
One could argue the prokaryotic life is 100% instinct though - adaptive responses seem to be pretty rare in bacteria.
And yet nature has managed to find a niche for this dysfunctional behaviour as a subset of such individuals have used the extra useless brain cycles to produce new knowledge and ways of thinking that transformed the societies in which they lived giving them an edge over competition and improved the odds of the survival of their kind.
Yes, but the overall framework - that our thinking can be broadly divided into habits/reaction and deliberation/forecasting - still holds, with a ton of supporting neural evidence.
> The mean power is 46%, which implies that only half of the results would be replicated in exact replication studies. The success rate in actual replication studies is often lower and may be as low as the estimated discovery rate (Bartos & Schimmack, 2020). So, replicability is somewhere between 12% and 46%. Even if half of the results are replicable, we do not know which results are replicable and which one’s are not. The Chapter-based analyses provide some clues which findings may be less trustworthy (implicit priming) and which ones may be more trustworthy (overconfidence), but the main conclusion is that the empirical basis for claims in “Thinking: Fast and Slow” is shaky.
Do you happen to know how many of the interesting studies replicated? A book can cite of studies, but the principal conclusions could be based only on a small subset of the citations.
I particular, I'd be very curios to know how many of the replicable results require a "behavioral" explanation and how many are explainable trough the utility functions and rational agents.
Test time compute reminds me of this artistic image. We are asking the model to look inside and unfold and tug on the compressed knotted threads and see which ones are useful.
I’ve always felt it’s unfair that people attribute the “System 1/System 2” dual-reasoning idea to KT. Their research was mostly behavioral, and many of their classic psychology experiments (Linda problem, law of small numbers, representativeness bias, etc.) never mentioned two systems. The dual-process framework only emerged around the 2000s in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Jonathan Evans, Keith Stanovich), which later provided brain-based evidence for it.
When the book came out, KT basically retrofitted their earlier behavioral work into this newer two-system framework. The book made the distinction famous, but that wasn’t really KT’s original contribution. Their biggest impact was bringing psychology into economics, i.e., prospect theory, alternative utility functions, and ultimately the creation of behavioral economics. I think people often don’t give enough credit to what they actually pioneered, and instead celebrate them for concepts they didn’t really originate.
I also find it funny when they attribute to Kahneman the very observation that people sometimes decide instinctively and sometimes not. It's like some kind of science-washing.
Thinking evolved in creatures only to help correlate the past to future, using some memory from the past. The correlations and responses gradually get codified into instincts and genes to help bypass the thinking, which is costly and slow.
Human thinking is considered a bad situation if the thinking goes beyond what's immediately needed, or if it makes the mind unavailable to process inputs from the senses. Any person who is lost in thought is in reality suffering from a lack of coordination between their body and mind, as their mind is no longer serving their body. It is not unusual that thinking considered same as worrying, as it indicates that person is unable to process information or concerned about something.
There's no way for evolution to read the history of how an organism responded to something and codify it into an instinct. All it can operate on is whether the organism reproduced. If a tendency to mull things over made the organism survive, that's what gets codified, not the actions it chose.
The whole advantage of thinking is being able to select adaptive responses to situations that change too rapidly for evolution to ever hard code as instincts.
The history of an individual organism can be read by future generations. But it's through epigenetics, not genetics - adding methyl groups to the helix structure that influence gene expression. These are inherited, but the changes only last a few generations and have limited (though not zero!) impact on evolution.
Beyond that, culture has a huge role to play. Many complex lifeforms learn how to survive from their parents and peers. Those groups with less adaptive strategies will be wiped out. For many organisms, they are not "thinking" per se, they are processing sensory data in the way they've been taught. The "thinking" was done by multilevel selection, weeding out ineffective strategies.
IOW, no organism technically needs to think through a problem from first principles. There's always some cultural heuristic to fall back on.
Second paragraph is spot on. The search space is far too large for evolution to provide direct solutions for every challenge a multicellular lifeform could face. General solutions rule. But it's likely that cultural adaptation plays a larger role than individual cognition.
One could argue the prokaryotic life is 100% instinct though - adaptive responses seem to be pretty rare in bacteria.
“There’s no way…” “The whole advantage…” may not break site guidelines, but the preface is almost never correct.
And yet nature has managed to find a niche for this dysfunctional behaviour as a subset of such individuals have used the extra useless brain cycles to produce new knowledge and ways of thinking that transformed the societies in which they lived giving them an edge over competition and improved the odds of the survival of their kind.
The studies in Thinking Fast and Slow mostly failed replication:
https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...
Yes, but the overall framework - that our thinking can be broadly divided into habits/reaction and deliberation/forecasting - still holds, with a ton of supporting neural evidence.
That's not true, or at least it only applies to some chapters. Most studies in the book did replicate.
No they did not, from the link I shared:
> The mean power is 46%, which implies that only half of the results would be replicated in exact replication studies. The success rate in actual replication studies is often lower and may be as low as the estimated discovery rate (Bartos & Schimmack, 2020). So, replicability is somewhere between 12% and 46%. Even if half of the results are replicable, we do not know which results are replicable and which one’s are not. The Chapter-based analyses provide some clues which findings may be less trustworthy (implicit priming) and which ones may be more trustworthy (overconfidence), but the main conclusion is that the empirical basis for claims in “Thinking: Fast and Slow” is shaky.
Do you happen to know how many of the interesting studies replicated? A book can cite of studies, but the principal conclusions could be based only on a small subset of the citations.
I particular, I'd be very curios to know how many of the replicable results require a "behavioral" explanation and how many are explainable trough the utility functions and rational agents.
> We humans cannot immediately provide the answer for "What's 12345 times 56789?"
Some humans can.
https://youtube.com/shorts/A2-I7tjl70w
Test time compute reminds me of this artistic image. We are asking the model to look inside and unfold and tug on the compressed knotted threads and see which ones are useful.
https://ibb.co/hRWC2S0V