On Kahneman

The best compliment one can receive or give is that you forget that you learned something good from someone and you act on it thinking it's almost innate. It's one of my meta-values. 

Last week after Kahneman passed away, I realized how much he had influenced my life. 

I found Kahneman right around the time Max came into my life. 

I started doubting my decisions but in a healthy way without sinking in a quagmire of self-doubt. The core value he instilled indirectly in me is if I want to help animals, I need to look beyond my self-interest. Most of our actions are based on self-interest and if one could surpass that there is immense beauty to life.

Thank you sir for everything you taught me. You and I are pessimists in others' eyes but we are realists who live to bring marginal optimism so that there is marginal improvement in the world. 

Kahneman (and Taleb) probably saved my life many times already by teaching me about risk.  

It is such a shame that 99.9% of the people in this country (and the world) don't even know him.

Humans haven't even scratched the surface of acting on his wisdom; there are immense good possibilities we are yet to implement. But the eternal possibilities are going to come from consilience of his wisdom with other insights we are yet to discover. 

This is a great tribute to him from his friends, students and people who understood the importance of what he gave to us:

Just wait, it’s going to change everything

By Barry Schwartz, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Swarthmore College

It was 1983, and I was working on a book that aimed to be a systematic critique of conceptions of human nature shared by economics, evolutionary biology, and Skinnerian psychology. I was an “expert” on Skinner, but very much an amateur when it came to the other two fields. In my critique of economics, my plan was to show that a slew of assumptions economists made about what people valued, what they cared about, and how they made decisions were wrong.

The work of Kahneman and Amos Tversky was to be a central part of my argument. But I was on shaky ground, preparing to make sweeping claims on the basis of what might have been very superficial understanding of their work and its implications. So I made appointments to see each of them—Tversky at Stanford and Kahneman at Berkeley—to lay out my arguments and give them a chance to educate me and protect me from embarrassing myself.

Both conversations went more or less the same way. At that moment in history, their work was mostly regarded as the discovery of a set of quirks and imperfections in decision-making that pretty much left the edifice of economic rationality intact. But their work, I argued, would revolutionize how economists think about human aspirations and decisions. It would revolutionize how we all think about what it means to be rational. Just wait, I said. It’s going to change everything.

Each of them, in their own way, tried to calm me down. Danny said that he rarely found himself in the position of defending economics, but my grandiose claims on his behalf had put him in that position. Yes, he agreed, their work might prove to be important, but it wasn’t going to turn anything upside down. He was kind and gentle as he tried to save me from public humiliation.

I left the conversations with each of them even more convinced that their discoveries would be world-changing. They failed to talk me out of my view. I wrote my book, The Battle for Human Nature. Essentially nobody bought it—the book or the argument. Nonetheless, I think the following 40 years have shown that I was right.

I interacted with Danny many times over the years since that conversation, which surely loomed much larger in my mind than his. But that initial conversation remains a jewel in my professional life, never to be forgotten.

[---]

Anxious and unsure

By Eric Johnson, Professor of Business, Columbia University

A few months before the publication of Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011, the Center for Decision Sciences had scheduled Danny to present in our seminar series. We were excited because he had decided to present his first “book talk” with us. Expecting a healthy crowd, we scheduled the talk in Uris 301, the biggest classroom in Columbia Business School.

I arrived in the room a half hour early to find Danny, sitting alone in the large room, obsessing over his laptop. He confided that he had just changed two-thirds of the slides for the talk and was quite anxious and unsure about how to present the material. Of course, after the introduction, Danny presented in his usual charming, erudite style, communicating the distinction between System 1 and System 2 with clarity to an engaged audience. Afterwards, I asked him how he thought it went, and he said, “It was awful, but at least now I know how to make it better.” Needless to say, the book went on to become an international bestseller.

This was not false modesty. Having studied overconfidence throughout his career, Danny seemed immune to its effects. While surely maddening to some coauthors, this resulted in work that was more insightful and, most importantly to Danny and to us, correct. He was not always right, but always responsive to evidence, supportive or contradictory. For example, when some of the evidence cited in the book was questioned as a result of the replication crisis in psychology, Danny revised his opinion, writing in the comments of a critical blog: “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies.”

The best tribute to Danny, I believe, is adopting this idea, that science and particularly the social sciences, is not about seeming right, but instead, being truthful.