The review was good, but some alarm bells went off when I read these paragraphs:
It is understandable that Kahneman has no use for Freud, but it is still regrettable. The insights of Kahneman and Freud are complementary rather than contradictory. Anyone who strives for a complete understanding of human nature has much to learn from both of them. The scope of Kahneman’s psychology is necessarily limited by his method. His method is to study mental processes that can be observed and measured under rigorously controlled experimental conditions. Following this method, he revolutionized psychology. He discovered mental processes that can be described precisely and demonstrated reliably. He discarded the poetic fantasies of Freud.
But together with the poetic fantasies, he discarded much else that was valuable. Since strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally controlled, Kahneman’s method did not allow him to study them. The part of the human personality that Kahneman’s method can handle is the nonviolent part, concerned with everyday decisions, artificial parlor games, and gambling for small stakes. The violent and passionate manifestations of human nature, concerned with matters of life and death and love and hate and pain and sex, cannot be experimentally controlled and are beyond Kahneman’s reach. Violence and passion are the territory of Freud. Freud can penetrate deeper than Kahneman because literature digs deeper than science into human nature and human destiny.
The idea that Freud can “penetrate deeper” (ha!) than Kahneman is (a) false and (b) epistemically harmful because it promotes the idea that intuition and flowery prose is in some way better than empiricism in discovering truths about our psychology. And of course, the idea that modern psychology is unable to study strong emotions or is worse at studying them than Freud is obviously false. Other than that, though, the review was a decent read.
Our failure to think like traders has important practical consequences, for good and for evil. The main consequence of the endowment effect is to give stability to our lives and institutions. Stability is good when a society is peaceful and prosperous. Stability is evil when a society is poor and oppressed. The endowment effect works for good in the German city of Munich. I once rented a home there for a year, a few miles from the city center. Across the street from our home was a real farm with potato fields and pigs and sheep. The local children, including ours, went out to the fields after dark, made little fires in the ground, and roasted potatoes. In a free-market economy, the farm would have been sold to a developer and converted into a housing development. The farmer and the developer would both have made a handsome profit. But in Munich, people were not thinking like traders. There was no free market in land. The city valued the farm as public open space, allowing city dwellers to walk over grass all the way to the city center, and allowing our children to roast potatoes at night. The endowment effect allowed the farm to survive.
In poor agrarian societies, such as Ireland in the nineteenth century or much of Africa today, the endowment effect works for evil because it perpetuates poverty. For the Irish landowner and the African village chief, possessions bring status and political power. They do not think like traders, because status and political power are more valuable than money. They will not trade their superior status for money, even when they are heavily in debt. The endowment effect keeps the peasants poor, and drives those of them who think like traders to emigrate.
the idea that modern psychology is unable to study strong emotions or is worse at studying them than Freud is obviously false.
I don’t disagree, I rather think that you’re probably right here, but I would feel more comfortable and certain with a couple of solid examples behind this statement, and I can’t think of any. Can you?
Dan Ariely did some studies of decision making while aroused or not.
Modern clinical psychology has a lot to say about emotions, particularly strong negative ones like anxiety, grief, anger, addiction and obsession (example: this guy studies anger). People like Daniel Gilbert have lots to say about happiness
I haven’t read Ariely’s research articles themselves, but I’ve seen this research summarized in Ariely’s (or maybe Wiseman’s) recent book. How is this a study of strong emotions? There’s much more to the emotional states than shifting preferences. For all we know, there may be systematic changes in certain competencies, susceptibility to certain kinds if stimuli, even lasting personality changes.
Didn’t know about Gilbert and Denson, thanks for pointing out their work.
Basically the review would have been just as good if those paragraphs wouldn’t have been there, it seemed almost a non-sequitor to my eyes. Was he trying to say something silly and clever to signal intelligence, reach a certain word count or was he just reading about Freud recently and had an overwhelming desire to talk about him?
If I was Straussian I would almost argue he was trying to trick us by exploiting our system one for that nonsense (since our intuitions say our intuitions are reliable), hoping the clever ones remember the lesson! Heh. :)
I’m guessing the reviewer just had a particular axe to grind—he likes Freud and wanted to argue that Freudian ideas shouldn’t be seen as low-status.
I don’t think the article is nearly clever enough to exploit the reader like that, although it would certainly explain the, er, Freudian slip in the second paragraph.
Admirers of Freud and James may hope that the time may come when they will stand together with Kahneman as three great explorers of the human psyche, Freud and James as explorers of our deeper emotions, Kahneman as the explorer of our more humdrum cognitive processes. But that time has not yet come.
This is the meat of his conclusion. I think Tetronian is right that the author enjoys the literary thinkers more than the scientific ones, even though those literary thinkers are likely to be relying heavily on System One.
Before that, the superficial parallels he draws between James and Kahneman are vexing in their superficiality.
If I was Straussian I would almost argue he was trying to trick us by exploiting our system one for that nonsense (since our intuitions say our intuitions are reliable), hoping the clever ones remember the lesson! Heh. :)
Hmmm, that gave me an idea.
Intuitions say intuitions are reliable, reason disagrees. Reason says that reason is often unreliable, intuition agrees. So we see generally intuitions and reason agree on what the best course of action is.
The review was good, but some alarm bells went off when I read these paragraphs:
The idea that Freud can “penetrate deeper” (ha!) than Kahneman is (a) false and (b) epistemically harmful because it promotes the idea that intuition and flowery prose is in some way better than empiricism in discovering truths about our psychology. And of course, the idea that modern psychology is unable to study strong emotions or is worse at studying them than Freud is obviously false. Other than that, though, the review was a decent read.
My alarm bells went off much earlier:
Ok maybe I was wrong here:
Some cool stuff after this.
I don’t disagree, I rather think that you’re probably right here, but I would feel more comfortable and certain with a couple of solid examples behind this statement, and I can’t think of any. Can you?
Dan Ariely did some studies of decision making while aroused or not.
Modern clinical psychology has a lot to say about emotions, particularly strong negative ones like anxiety, grief, anger, addiction and obsession (example: this guy studies anger). People like Daniel Gilbert have lots to say about happiness
I haven’t read Ariely’s research articles themselves, but I’ve seen this research summarized in Ariely’s (or maybe Wiseman’s) recent book. How is this a study of strong emotions? There’s much more to the emotional states than shifting preferences. For all we know, there may be systematic changes in certain competencies, susceptibility to certain kinds if stimuli, even lasting personality changes.
Didn’t know about Gilbert and Denson, thanks for pointing out their work.
Yes that part made me cringe too.
Basically the review would have been just as good if those paragraphs wouldn’t have been there, it seemed almost a non-sequitor to my eyes. Was he trying to say something silly and clever to signal intelligence, reach a certain word count or was he just reading about Freud recently and had an overwhelming desire to talk about him?
If I was Straussian I would almost argue he was trying to trick us by exploiting our system one for that nonsense (since our intuitions say our intuitions are reliable), hoping the clever ones remember the lesson! Heh. :)
I’m guessing the reviewer just had a particular axe to grind—he likes Freud and wanted to argue that Freudian ideas shouldn’t be seen as low-status.
I don’t think the article is nearly clever enough to exploit the reader like that, although it would certainly explain the, er, Freudian slip in the second paragraph.
This is the meat of his conclusion. I think Tetronian is right that the author enjoys the literary thinkers more than the scientific ones, even though those literary thinkers are likely to be relying heavily on System One.
Before that, the superficial parallels he draws between James and Kahneman are vexing in their superficiality.
Hmmm, that gave me an idea.
Intuitions say intuitions are reliable, reason disagrees. Reason says that reason is often unreliable, intuition agrees. So we see generally intuitions and reason agree on what the best course of action is.