[Link] Less Wrong Wiki article with very long summary of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
I’ve made very extensive notes, along with my assessment, of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, and have passed it around to aspiring rationalist friends who found my notes very useful. So I though I would share these with the Less Wrong community by creating a Less Wrong Wiki article with these notes. Feel free to optimize the article based on your own notes as well. Hope this proves as helpful to you as it did to those others whom I shared my notes with.
That summary is 100 pages long (31,547 words). I’d recommend trimming it down. I hadn’t looked into this much before, but was quickly able to find a study repeating my concerns:
- Jonathan St. B.T. Evans
I haven’t read the book, but the dual-processing theory itself comes across to me as tautological. I look at the evidence often presented and think they’re arguing: if somebody gets the right answer, they must either be using System 2, or the right answer must be a part of System 1. If somebody gets the wrong answer, they must not be using System 2. Just skimming your review, I got the impression you were just attempting to describe the book, and not being very critical of its arguments. In particular, I couldn’t find any discussions of the empirical evidence. What do you think are the most important studies which either support or hurt this theory? What sort of studies do you think need to be performed to really say whether this is a good accounting of human reasoning? What would cause you to decide this theory is wrong?
My purpose was to provide my long summary, not a review :-) I think there’s lots of interesting stuff from Stanovich and others on alternative ways of depicting human thinking processes. Not saying Kahneman is right or wrong. Just wanted to share my notes for the benefit of the community. If it was a review, I wouldn’t have posted it on the wiki itself.
Is the formatting messed up? You’ve got a ten-page paragraph in there.
Thanks for catching the formatting issues! Fixed it :-)
I would recommend that you change the formatting to be the following: ′ list item’, ‘* sublist item’, ‘==header item==’ and ‘===subheader item===’.
Will do it when I have the time, or someone who is interested can do so in the meantime.
You had time to write over 30 thousand words, and no time to fix the formatting?
I predict that this will not happen.
You had time to write over 30 thousand words, and no time to fix the formatting so that it can be read?
I predict that this will not happen.
I’m guessing he only created a LW wiki article as an afterthought. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we punish people for making imperfect contributions we likely won’t get any contributions at all.
Thanks!
I wrote over 30000 words for myself when I was reading and summarizing it. I then shared my notes with friends who were aspiring rationalists but didn’t have time to read the book. They were blown away by my notes, and strongly encouraged me to share them publicly with the LW community.
This is what I did with the LW Wiki article, taking the time to upload my notes, format them, and reformat them based on requests. To answer your point below, the article appears to me to right now be mostly bullet points and short paragraphs. I’m using Firefox, don’t know about how it comes out on other browsers.
I see more bullet points and short paragraphs now (in both Safari and Firefox), but after “Longer summary” it reverts to a wall-o-text per chapter.
Yup, wall of text per chapter. Don’t have time to spend more on editing it now :-)
I still see 90% of the article as a single paragraph. However you’re doing bullet points, it isn’t working.