Talk:Thinking, Fast and Slow

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I think this needs checked for copyright infringement. Notice the "As shown in the figure below" in the "Prospect Theory" section.--Therealdrag0 (talk) 23:29, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

I took a first pass to improve NPOV in this article. I think it could still use some more work. I suspect the original article was written by the publisher or at least a big fan of the book. User:snickell —Preceding undated comment added 23:12, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Will see if some references can be added. FeatherPluma (talk) 03:38, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Part about two selves

It seems that two findings are mixed up in this section. Kahnemann observed patients having a colonoscopy and let them rate their state of (un)happiness, but he did not change the length of the treatments ( this would probably be viewed as highly unethical, so I think it is important to check that point) and this was an observation study and not a controlled experiment.

There is another experiment described in the book where subjects have to put their hand in extremely cold water. There are two settings in this experiment: in the first setting, subjects had to hold their hands in the water ( held at a fixed temperature ) for x seconds and then they could withdraw the hand from the water. Subjects in the second setting also had to hold their hands in the water for x seconds ( at the same fixed temperature ), but then have to hold the hand in the water for another y seconds which is made slightly warmer, without the subjects knowing of it.

The second setting was rated as less negative in hindsight. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2003:45:4B35:6901:5D3B:2A00:3ABF:D1C0 (talk) 09:28, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Ordering of preferences for probability of loss

The section in Prospect theory say that "place the greatest value of all on a change from 0% to 10% (going to a chance of winning from no chance)", but then "the order of the first and third of those is reversed when the event is presented as losing ... there, the greatest value is placed on eliminating the probability of a loss to 0.". But this would be exactly the same ordering. Something is amiss. FMalan (talk)

Either you are misreading. You quoted "place the greatest value... " but the article says "place the greater value...".

...Or perhaps the article was edited to be correct, and then someone forgot to remove the flagging on the article.162.205.217.211 (talk) 23:00, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Note: The link for the cited material, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, points to a document that no longer exists. -199.83.221.236 (talk) 23:04, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

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chapter 25 Bernoulli's Errors. (Penguin 2012 pg275)

Am i the only one who fails to comprehend Anthony & Betty example ?

I do not compute the same final numbers. Are they gifts or investments with cost to initial wealth, or typos !? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.66.116.91 (talk) 02:01, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

criticism - style of writing

i belive the article about the book cant be complete without a criticism section. a criticism focusing not only on the theories/findings presented in the book, but also on how the book is written. if i may say so, theres just too many crappy books out there being heavily advertised by saying that it is a bestseller, therefore it must be a good read, or eg. falsely creating the notion, that the author is associated with the world famous nobel laurate prize.

i dont feel entitled to start such a section myself by reading the first 67 pages of the book, but i already have an uneasy feeling about it: it seems to me, that however exciting the idea described in it, the writing itself is somehow clumsy, doesnt lend itself to be easily read/followed/understood. I should get back to this after finishing the book, but one conclusion already lends itself: even a brilliant scientist doesn't necessarily make a good writer - which is what really matters in popular science literature. So i suggest to add a section to the article abut how well written the book is (based on what critics made of it). 176.63.176.112 (talk) 19:06, 12 May 2017 (UTC).

The feeling that sg is deeply wrong with this book seems coherent with this review: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-k-levine/thinking-fast-and-slow-an_b_1906061.html

This is not to say the book is completely bad, or that the author's ideas are is wrong - but to make a neutral and informative article theres definitely a need for a criticism section. The description of this book in the lede as "a bestseller" implies the false notion that it is well written. 176.63.176.112 (talk) 20:55, 12 May 2017 (UTC).

now, after having read almost half of the book, i must adjust my previous opinion, it is extremely poorly written. omitting detalis crucial to understanding while pondering on many less relevant, or straight irrelevant details, often awkwardly written sentences, verbosity making me want to rewrite the book, or rather throw it away. p.154 in the paperback (towards the end of the section called "tom w's specialty") he desribes some typical intuitive answers to a probability-related question, tells us that the real probability is surprisingly different , tells the correct answer 11 and 94.1 percents respectively), and concludes by saying that how the correct percentages are calculated is not relevant in this book, ergo the reader is left to just take his word that we should rather believe an undisclosed statistical calculation rather than our intuition. i bet that this much was known to most readers before this book was written. if i know anything, the single purpose of book s of this genre (popular science) is to disclose exacltly how something is according to science and do it in a way that is easily followed by the layperson. now this book is all the opposite of that. yet it still contains a lot of interesting information hidden behind its horrible writing style and pompous awkwardness which sums up to a book only slightly worse than the average half-decent book. Maybe even not worse. 176.63.176.112 (talk) 18:19, 21 May 2017 (UTC).

Such criticism is not apt IMHO.

1) It is quite immaterial to the content of the book. For a non-fiction book summarizing a Nobel prize winner life of work, edit quality is vastly less central than in a fiction book like Harry Potter. Evidently, its sales give it a good bestseller rating, even with whatever writing issues there are.

This is simply a side issue for many readers, I think.

2) it would be original research, which is not a wikipedia editor job and strictly not allowed. Jazi Zilber (talk) 17:08, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

However I wish to, I am not able to disagree with your reply. But that does not make me wish less to find a way to put some additional information in the article that either prepares the reader to "what it is like" to read the book, or even substitutes the reading itself.

to make justice to the book, i find it increasingly interesting to read starting from about page 180 (the paperback edition), that is from the chapter on "regression to the mean" and on from there.

my emotions about the book stem from a completely subjective notion: i highly enjoyed another book (dawkins: the selfish gene) and found no difficulty in following it, while i felt the contrary when i was reading "thinking fast and slow" even though my previous knowledge and understanding of both books topics was comparably similar (that is nothing beyond what a moderately interested layperson can know).

one of my reasons to feel like adding some info regarding the book's style (a criticism to it) is exactly because i felt misguided by the "bestseller" label. after seeing the pdf documentg linked in the wikipedia article sources, i understood, that the book was labelled bestseller for one particular week by one particular newspaper and was on the same list with other books that i would not have expected to be a good read. had i not imagined a book written in a popular style, i might have experienced much less ressentiment reading this book. so it still feels right to me that the article would profit (eg.:become more informative) if it included some kind of warning about the book being worth reading because of its topic even though its style is not that mcuh appealing.80.98.79.37 (talk) 21:17, 27 May 2017 (UTC).

Thanks. You are right that bestselling might be undrstood as easier reading. But Thomas Piketty is a bestseller, while it might be unreadable (my shallow impression without reading it).

I changed to "science best-selling book" so the science clarifies a little

It was a bestseller for a long period of time. Here is a link from months later, and it says it was on the bestseller list for 22 weeks then. It certainly kept staying there for awhile. [1] Jazi Zilber (talk) 09:51, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

it is a funny coincidence that you mention Piketty because i have just discovered the article abouit his book and i was going to refer to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century) as a good example of how an article about a book of this genre should be written - at least that seems to be my taste for it.

and thank you for pointing out that Thinking Fast and Slow was not just for one week on the bestseller list - I must have misinterpreted what I saw.

i do not want to impose on you my side of the matter about this article, so won't repeat myself beyond saying, that in the popular science book genre the style is the sole most important attribute of a book because the content of it is already published in the scientific publications that preceded it and it is the ease of explanation that makes it accessible to the wider public which is after all the aim of such books.80.98.79.37 (talk) 22:04, 30 May 2017 (UTC).

Whereas your content might be interesting and valuable, your own writing mechanics leave much to be desired. Unless you liken yourself to the "ts eliot of prose", please for goodness sake, use proper capitalization! (196.247.57.172 (talk) 04:18, 6 January 2020 (UTC))

heureka!

yeah, almost through with it - i have just started the appendices. and now the idea of what is utterly wrong with this book (finally!) struck me: he devotes 418 pages to convince the reader that the human mind is not naturally set to statistics. thats his first, second, third, fourth, hundredth, thousandth and gazoundth and finally last and after that his next final plus one point to make. all layed out meticulously in 418 pages without next to nothing else to tell. which makes his book an extraordinarily boring reading with not much to take home when finally (finally!) you close the last page. he avoids teaching the reader how to become a decent statistician in his daily routine, he avoids telling a story, he avoids everything else and only struggles to say that people are not naturally born to be able to make correct statistical evaluations. never mind, that his point could have been introduced roughly in 2 pages (with an evolutional background included) and then could be proven unerringly in another 100 pages containing all the experiments and findings used in this book. had this book been written in 100 pages it would be hilarious. had it been half of its acual size, it would be a decent book still desrving to be remembered.

also the mention of this book being marketed successfully, eg: it becoming a bestseller does not belong to the lede. instead it should be either in the reception section or in a section about the marketing of the book. 80.98.79.37 (talk) 17:08, 15 June 2017 (UTC).

the book is mostly discussing statistics and probability calculations which you would need to have some expertise at to be able to truly appreciate. it also proves through many examples that normally people do not think in terms of statistics and probabilities - they are just not built to do so. even people who have been taught to calculate probabilities dont use this knowledge unless specifically reminded to do so. its just not natural to us. the parts that describe the heuristical guessing process of human intuition that is built-in in our mind instead of statistical probabilitiy assessment are the really interesting part of the book. too bad that this interesting part is only about 25% of the whole. 80.98.79.37 (talk) 22:32, 16 June 2017 (UTC).

this article (while it is just a magazine article, not a really serious source) provides exacltly what is missing from Kahnemans approach: evolutionary perspective, a logical line of thought to explain why it makes sense that people dont evluate precisely situations in a mathematical sense. i would go as far as state the article is more valuable in a substance vs bulk sense (and with a better, wider perspective) than the Kahneman book while dealing with basically the same matter. https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior

89.134.199.32 (talk) 13:54, 19 April 2019 (UTC).

Folks, this page is for discussing improvements to the article. It is not for general discussions about the book. Please do that elsewhere. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:51, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

sorry for discussing the book on its articles talkpage. i have to admit, that i think it is not "folks" - it was me in both the above two remarks, just my ip address seems to have changed over time. anyway, on the one hand i admit you are right to tell me, that the talkpage should be reserved for discussion related to the article, on the other hand please consider my intent to actually discuss the article just as you advise. i think the article is unsatisfactory in talking about this book as a good one to read, almost to the extent of being a marketing praise for the book as something readers should hold in high esteem and as a result of it go and buy for themselves. i think the article needs to talk instead of just the book being a success (as in a bestseller by a nobel laurate) about the topic of the book itself and that leads to what you perceived in my comments as generic discussion of the book. bottomline: i would like to bring attention to one more article related to the book and its discussion of, well to put it short: reality. heres the article link: https://jasoncollins.blog/2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/

89.134.199.32 (talk) 11:53, 15 March 2020 (UTC).

what i mean the article could/should be improved by including some key points of view regarding the book provided by the criticism. 89.134.199.32 (talk) 11:55, 15 March 2020 (UTC).

Shouldn't the author's retraction of some of the material be included in the article? And some of the criticisms?

https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/12/kahneman_and_tversky_researched_the_science_of_error_and_still_made_errors.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by Unrepresentational (talk • contribs) 10:51, 12 October 2018 (UTC)