Reading Thinking Fast and Slow, and its pretty good but I am annoyed at the triumphalism over the conjunction fallacy... the favorite example being: --- Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable? Linda is a bank teller. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. --- So by Venn diagram logic the former is more probable since its a superset of the latter, but most people will say the second is more likely. The trouble is most people read in an implicit and is not active in the feminist movement after the first. (Or, more cynically, is just a normal person). So it IS revealing about our psychology, but more more so in terms of how actual humans tell stories about other humans vs how folks in the lab try to lay things out. Its sort of like how casinos and lotteries are artificial environments constructed outside the rules of the overwhelming bulk of the rest of our experience. And these chapters of the book are full of this self-congratulatory, look how broken we found peoples analysis is. (And *sometimes* that breakage significant, but again, it says more about how we can be misled by the setup of stories. I think the chapters on priming are much scarier and prone to exploitation.)
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 03:41:14 +0000
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