My problem with this book is that it relies heavily on priming studies. The idea is that you "primed" them for some set of behaviors.
Here's an example of a study that supposedly supports this. Participants held a pen in their mouth in one of two ways:
- Between the teeth, without touching the lips. This activates some of the muscles used in smiling.
- Between the lips, without using the teeth. This inhibits those smile-related muscles.
If you think that's stupid and reading into this is foolish it's because it is. A lot of the arguments in this book are built in a delicate set of assumptions that are supported by equally ridiculous and contrived experiments, many of which cannot be reproduced.
Daniel Kahneman is a big EA (Effective Altruism) advocate, aka the cult that all the tech elites such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk are a part of.
The book is selling you on a belief system (i.e. System1/System2). Then it uses some cherry picked data to set up a straw man to rationalize his idea of how the mind works. Death in a Shallow Pond is a good rebuttal to this even if it doesn't address the book directly.
I appreciate the insights of Alfred Korzybski: the map is not the territory, the verb "to be" can be very reducing, etc.
His thoughts also directly inspired Dianetics, i.e. Scientology, and several prominent followers of Korzybski's philosophy were syphoned in the pipeline to Dianetics and Scientology.
I still find his work insightful and don't follow the same path.
I think the same can be done with Kahneman's concepts. Sometimes, when the logical thread from a few good ideas gets too long, you need to do a reality check and use it as a "reductio ab absurdum" that this thread went nowhere.
My problem with this book is that it relies heavily on priming studies. The idea is that you "primed" them for some set of behaviors.
Here's an example of a study that supposedly supports this. Participants held a pen in their mouth in one of two ways:
- Between the teeth, without touching the lips. This activates some of the muscles used in smiling.
- Between the lips, without using the teeth. This inhibits those smile-related muscles.
If you think that's stupid and reading into this is foolish it's because it is. A lot of the arguments in this book are built in a delicate set of assumptions that are supported by equally ridiculous and contrived experiments, many of which cannot be reproduced.
Discussions from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030791
Has anything came back to reestablish this book as worth the read ?
Daniel Kahneman is a big EA (Effective Altruism) advocate, aka the cult that all the tech elites such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk are a part of.
The book is selling you on a belief system (i.e. System1/System2). Then it uses some cherry picked data to set up a straw man to rationalize his idea of how the mind works. Death in a Shallow Pond is a good rebuttal to this even if it doesn't address the book directly.
I appreciate the insights of Alfred Korzybski: the map is not the territory, the verb "to be" can be very reducing, etc.
His thoughts also directly inspired Dianetics, i.e. Scientology, and several prominent followers of Korzybski's philosophy were syphoned in the pipeline to Dianetics and Scientology.
I still find his work insightful and don't follow the same path.
I think the same can be done with Kahneman's concepts. Sometimes, when the logical thread from a few good ideas gets too long, you need to do a reality check and use it as a "reductio ab absurdum" that this thread went nowhere.