YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Kahneman

lines on the record: 83
first: 2018-12-19
most recent: 2018-12-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Picks the teams by results. So what he has, he has people competing in making probabilistic forecasts of strategic or economic events in the medium and short term. And some people are more accurate than others. And after a year of that, you select the top 2% and you call them super forecasters. And that gives them a very good feeling, you know, to be labeled super forecasters. And they do not regress to the means. That is the second year. They're just about as good as the first year. That's the basic finding.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Phil Tetlock really has a comprehensive list, which I'm not going to remember. But at the margin I gave, they will be intelligent, they will be numerate. They will be open-minded. They'll be curious.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is what I was saying earlier about breaking up problem into dimensions and averaging. There's no averaging, but there is looking at a problem from multiple dimensions and collecting a lot of information. And that's basically what creates super forecasters.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, filth deadlock is another friend, but he's also a hero. I mean, I think this is beautiful research. I think it's proved beyond the shadow of the doubt that when you have people making forecasts for the medium term, you know, up to six months in many situations, you can have people thinking carefully without any training who do better than CIA analysts. That's fundamentally what he has shown. And he really knows why, or he knows how they do it. And the tricks are very simple. I mean, you know, if you made a list of intelligent ways to go at problems, that's what people do. They view the problem as an instance of a category and then they switch to looking at the problem from the inside. And essentially they adopt different points of view. It's not the same thing.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in some cases, we know, and you can do that associatively. I mean, it really depends on the associative structure that is imposed by a given culture. So, you know, to give you a sense of the way that works, there is psychologist Paul Rosen, who has done some brilliant experiments on that. In one of the experiments, so he has people, and they're given a, they have a glass of orange juice and they have a sticker and they're asked to write on that sticker cyanide and to stick it on the juice and then to drink the juice. And they don't want to. Now, this is something, it's an emotion of which people have no control. And our socialization has created those emotions in us. And we're conditioned to have them under some conditions. Other cultures. Are disgusted by other things.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, in the sense that this is a norm. And there are things that we're trained or socialized to find disgusting, to find repugnant. And so there are repugnant transactions. And you have to treat them as you treat every other moral feeling. We have lots of moral feelings, things that we find unacceptable without any ability to really explain why they're unacceptable. There is such a thing as moral emotion. There is such a thing as indignation, as moral disgust. And that's what we're talking about here.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you know, I don't think it's a bias. No, I think it's an attention deficit. So it means that people have difficulty controlling their retention, focusing on what they want to focus on and staying focused. That's neither biased nor noise. Bias and noise do not cover the universe. There are other categories.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need noise for that. Bias will do it for you. And there is a lot of bias in that direction. I mean, people clearly overestimate what they can do and how good they are. And that's a blessing, undoubtedly.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In you are sort of making a lot of assumptions and not used to. In this question, you seem to assume that there is something very competitive that could be alleviated.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, you know, there is one condition under which noise is very useful, and that if there is a selection process, evolution works on noise. So you have random variation and then selection. But when there is no selection, noise is just a cost.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Break the decision up. It's not so much a matter of time because you don't want people to get paralyzed by analysis, but it's a matter of planning how you're going to make the decision and making it in stages and not acting without an intuitive certainty that you are doing the right thing, but just delay it until all the information is available.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those rare cases, and Gary Klein and others have demonstrated that, where you have intuition, that's true for athletes. They respond intuitively, it's true for tresmasters, it's true for firefighters, captains, as Gary Klein has shown. So that's intuitive expertise. I don't think CEOs encounter many problems where they have intuitive expertise. They haven't had the opportunity to acquire it. So that better slow down.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My advice is divide and conquer that is, there is one thing that we know that improves the quality of judgment, I think, and this is to delay intuition. I think there is in the audience a friend of mine, Gary Klein, who is violently opposed to what I'm saying, but as are many others, but I'm here. So I think delaying intuition is a very good idea. And delaying intuition until the facts are at hand. And looking at dimensions of the problem separately and independently is a better use of information. And the problem with intuition is that it forms very quickly. So that you need to have special procedures in place to control it.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know enough about that. All I do know is that when we pointed out the results, the bewildering results of the experiment on underwriters, and there was another unit people who assessed the size of claims, again about, actually it's more than 50%, like 58%. The thing that were the most striking was that nobody in the organization had any idea that this was going on. So it took people completely by surprise. My guess now is that wherever people exercise judgment, there is noise. And as a first rule, there is more noise than people expect, and there is more noise than they can imagine because it's very difficult to imagine that people have a very different opinion from yours when your opinion is right, which it is. So that's the way it works.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making independent assessments of each candidate. And that reduces the standard deviation of error, at least by a factor of two.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the wisdom of the crowds will work and pooling When errors are independent, that is when everybody is inclined to make the same mistake, which is then a bias. Then having multiple individuals engaged in it, they share their biases, you'll get the bias, it's going to be worsened and everybody will have much higher confidence in their bias views because other people share them. So wisdom of the crowd works under quite specified conditions. With respect to the underwriters, I would expect certainly that if you took 12 underwriters assessing the same risk, you would eliminate the noise. You would be left with bias, but you would eliminate one source of error. And the question is just price. Google, for example, when it selects, when it hires people, They have a minimum of four individuals.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wouldn't really be necessarily the same as either bias or noise. I mean, getting inadequate information, not getting adequate information when it's available is a stupid thing to do and a very common thing, and it's not exactly a bias and it's not necessarily it would contribute more to noise than to bias, by the way, by and large when people collect too little information or are swayed by the first thing that comes to mind, you get noise rather than bias.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there is room for, and the procedures by which you would reduce bias and reduce noise are not the same. So that's what I'm fascinated by these days.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assessing risk. So that's noise. And you find variability across individuals, which is not supposed to exist, and you find variability within individual, depending morning, afternoon, hot, cold. I mean, a lot of things influence the way that people make judgments, whether they are full, whether they've had lunch or haven't had lunch effects, judges, and things like that. It's hard to say what there is more of noise or bias, but one thing is very certain that bias Has been overestimated at the expense of noise. I mean, virtually all the literature and a lot of public conversation is about biases. But in fact, noise is, I think, extremely important, very prevalent. And there is an interesting fact that noise and bias are independent sources of error. So that producing either of them improves overall accuracy.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now I could ask you, and I asked the executives in the firm, and it's a number on which just about everybody agrees. So suppose you take two people at random, two underwriters at random, you average the premium they set, you take the difference between them, and you divide the difference by the average. So by what percentage do people differ? Would you expect people to differ? There is a common answer that you find, you know, when I just talk to people and ask them, or the executives had the same answer. It's somewhere around 10%. That's what people expect to see in a well-run firm. Now, what we found was 50%, 5-0. Which, by the way, mean that those underwriters were absolutely wasting their time. I mean, if in the sense...”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll tell you where the experiment from which my current fascination was noise arose. I was working with an insurance company and we did a very standard experiment. They constructed cases, very routine standard cases, expensive cases. We're not talking of ensuring cause. We're talking of ensuring financial firms for risk of fraud. So you have people who are specialists in this. This is what they do. So cases were constructed completely realistic, the kind of thing that people encounter every day. And you have 50 people reading a case and putting a dollar value on it.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say thus. So first of all, let me explain what I mean by noise. I mean, just randomness. And it's true. Within individuals, but it's especially true among individuals who are supposed to be interchangeable in, say, organizations. Can I spend three minutes to explain that?”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Its beautiful research. I'm convinced that's right. And indeed, you don't have to go as far as he does to find cases in which people act fairly rationally. People act fairly rationally in routine transactions. So if there is a thing that's loss aversion, that it plays a large role and that's less research. In novices, they get attached to things and then they don't want to sell them. They get over it over time. And in routine transactions, you know, when I go and I spend some money to get shoes, I feel no loss aversion for the money and certainly the person who sells me his shoes feels no loss aversion. The shoes. It's a routine transaction and it's the whole domain in which loss aversion. Doesn't apply”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but you identify, I mean, you know, it's not, there are emotions over which you have very little control, and it's a fact that you feel pride when your team wins, and in fact you feel pride of a stranger who lives on your street gets a prize. So that tendency to identify with what's around us and with things that we are connected to is very powerful. We derive a lot of emotion from it. I wouldn't call that a bias because you can call any emotion a bias.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a tendentious way of labeling things, to call them biases. I wouldn't call the effect on music a biasing effect. It completes the experience. And what were your other examples?”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly invest heavily in memories. I mean, you know, vacations for many people are investment in the formation and maintenance of memories. So there is a lot of investment. Whether it's too much or too little, it probably depends a lot on people's amount of consumption of memory that people engage in. So I, for one, am certainly biased, but I do not consume my memories a lot. I almost never go back to photographs, not deliberately. You know, if I stumble on something, it will move me, but the idea of going back to relive a vacation, that's not what I do. So I have little empathy for this.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can talk yourself out of some biases, I think. I mean, I wouldn't generalize on that, but it would take, you know, I could possibly talk myself out of that one by, you know, really sort of repeating to myself how stupid it is. But it would take a lot of work. It's not that you can decide once and for all I will not be subject to that bias. It doesn't work that way.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happiness feels good in the moment. But it's in the moment. What you're left with are your memories. That's the very striking thing that memories stay with you and the reality of life is gone in an instant. And so memory has a disproportionate weight because it's with us. It stays with us. It's the only thing we get to keep”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No idea. I haven't tried. You know, there is a lot of work these days on trying to make people happier and trying to coach people. In the UK in particular, it's a whole, you know, there is, I wouldn't call it an industry, but it's sponsored by government. My friend Lord Layard has started a movement that promotes happiness. There's a great deal of that happening, and I don't know how successful it is because the criterion for evaluation, it's very difficult to conduct evaluations on those things because people who know they've been subjected to interventions cannot really answer those questions honestly, even if they try. So the way to test whether things are successful would be to ask a person's friends, has he become or she become happier? That hasn't been done.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Altogether, I don't think that people maximize happiness in that sense. And that's one of the reasons that I actually let them field of happiness in that I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn't seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, if you were asking what are the evolutionary value, the duration of pain is really not very important. What's important is the intensity because the intensity is a measure of the severity of threat. The duration is really something else. It's very striking that it's completely insignificant when people in many situations it's completely insignificant, quite a striking result.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not at all sure that people. My guess is that people are conscious of that they don't want the peak to be too far from the end. That's my guess.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, if you want good memories, good endings are really important. The question is how important good memories are relative to the experience itself, but no question ends are very important. They're particularly important in the context of goal striving. That is, whether you achieve a goal or don't achieve a goal, colors the whole experience of trying to get it, to get to it. So ends are very important for memories.”
2018-12-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source