DANIEL KAHNEMAN TURNED 80 IN MARCH 5TH. HOW HAS KAHNEMANS WORK INFLUENCED YOUR OWN? WHAT STEP DID IT MAKE POSSIBLE? For their responses to Thalers question—How has Kahnemans work influenced your own? What step did it make possible?— we asked a selected group of Edgeis to include inspired leaps off of Kahnemans shoulders, not just applications of his ideas. We used a comment made by research psychologist Steven Pinker in the Q&A following Kahnemans talk at the 2011 Edge Master Class, as an example. Pinker said: If somebody were to ask me what are the most important contributions to human life from psychology, I would identify this work [by Kahneman & Tversky] as maybe number one, and certainly in the top two or three. In fact, I would identify the work on reasoning as one of the most important things that weve learned about anywhere. When we were trying to identify what any educated person should know in the entire expanse of knowledge, I argued unsuccessfully that the work on human cognition and probabilistic reason should be up there as one of the first things any educated person should know. One way to consider the long and illustrious career of a great thinker such as Kahneman is not as a summation, but as a commission, one that gives us permission to move forward in certain ways. (Think Newtons If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.) As social psychologist Richard Nisbett noted, Its not just a celebration of Danny. Its a celebration of behavioral science.. —John Brockman DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2013. He is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton, and author of Thinking Fast and Slow.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 23:07:51 +0000
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