27 Oct 2013 book-review books kahneman thinking cognitive-bias

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman: Book Review

Kahneman points out that we only remember the intuitions which turned out to be true, noone talks about those intuitions which turned out to be false. He also cautions us to consider the role that luck plays in any success.

In the world of software this reliance on intuition is often used when interviewing people for jobs and choosing who to hire based on an intuitive judgement. Kahneman suggests making a list of about 6 traits that are pre-requisites for the position and then ranking each candidate against those. The candidate who scores the highest is the best choice.

e.g. if we saw a person reading The New York Times on the subway which of the following is a better bet about this stranger?

If we judge based on representativeness we’ll bet on the PhD because our stereotypes tell us that a PhD student is more likely to be reading the New York Times than a person without a college degree. However, there are many more non graduates on the subway than PhDs so the likelihood is that the person doesn’t have a college degree.

Kahneman encourages us to take the base rates of the population into account even if we have evidence about the case at hand. He uses the example of predicting how long a project will take and suggests using the data from previous similar projects as a baseline and then adjusting that based on our specific case.

People who were presented with the first option were much more likely to favour surgery than those shown the second option.

Email







Tumblr

Reddit



Pinterest

