Daniel Kahneman is dead. A Nobel Prize winner, he's one of the most regnant thinkers of this century, influencing countless disciplines and professions, including wildland fire. His life is more interesting than what is represented in this post. At one point in his childhood in occupied France, he hid from the Nazis in a chicken coop. Here are a few excerpts from the NYTimes obit: Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky, a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making. As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results. Professor Kahneman’s public reputation rested heavily on his 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which appeared on best-seller lists in science and business. One commentator, the essayist, mathematical statistician and former option trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the influential book on improbability “The Black Swan,” placed “Thinking” in the same league as Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” and Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Here's a bit more detail from the Washington Post obit: Dr. Kahneman presented his ideas to a general audience in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which distinguished between two modes of thought: System 1, in which the mind, acting quickly, relies on intuition, immediate impressions and emotional reactions; and System 2, in which the mind, slowing down, functions more rationally and analytically and is able to correct errors made by System 1. Much of the time, Dr. Kahneman argued, the mind works in System 1 and draws conclusions using System 1’s toolbox: rules of thumb, cognitive biases and anything else that speeds up the judgment process. Dr. Kahneman and Tversky did experiments that demonstrated various cognitive biases. They showed, for instance, that many more people were willing to make a 20-minute trip to save $5 on the price of a $15 calculator than to make the same trip to save the same amount of money, $5, on a $125 calculator — an example of what is known as the framing effect. In another Kahneman-Tversky experiment, students were told about a fictitious Linda, 31, who was an activist in college and “was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.” Then the students were asked which was more likely: that Linda is a bank teller or that Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. The vast majority went with bank teller and active feminist, which has to be the less likely choice because the probability of two conditions will always be less than the probability of either one. This experiment demonstrated what is known as the conjunction fallacy, another way in which people sometimes fail to think logically. One type of psychological distortion that occupied Dr. Kahneman in later years was the difference between “experienced” and “remembered” well-being and between experienced and remembered happiness or unhappiness. The remembered experience, he said, was largely determined by its most extreme moment, or peak, and by its end — hence the “peak-end rule.” According to the rule, if we have a pleasurable experience at the end of a vacation, for instance, we tend to remember the entire holiday fondly. Similarly, if we feel less pain at the end of a medical procedure, we recall the entire experience as less painful. Sometimes, he found, the remembered experience is more important than the experience itself. If you haven't read Thinking, Fast and Slow yet, you should.
He's one of those few that is already part of your thinking without you realizing it. Here's a simple video that explains some of his work:
