YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Nisbett

lines on the record: 91
first: 2021-12-31
most recent: 2021-12-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Amy Lowell says, you know, I was in an art museum and I saw a sculpture of bronze horses and I thought, you know, that might be an interesting topic for a poem someday. Months later, she sits down, and as she says, the poem was there. Without having thought about it consciously in that period of time. The point being, if you prime the unconscious with something, it'll go doing work, including at night. I have a friend who said, you know, I'm working on calculus homework problems, you know, I get to problem three, and I can't figure it out and work for 30 minutes, nothing's happening. So he just goes to sleep. And often it's not he wakes up and says, oh, that's a bathtub problem. That's all that is.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cora says, Well, I put my foot on the, I boost out on vacation, I wasn't thinking about work at all. And at the moment I put my foot on the step of the bus. It occurred to me that the functions I needed to solve this problem were the very Fuxian functions that I had used to solve another problem years ago.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if I just sit down for 10 minutes and say, well, what are the main points I want this material to make and what would I do if somebody raises a particular point? How would I deflect the discussion in that direction and so on? I don't have to think for long, but then several days later, without having consciously thought about the thought questions at all, I sit down and start taking the thought questions by dictation. They start flowing out of my bed. And it turns out that if you ask highly creative people, I mean, great people, poincar ⁇, the mathematician, Amy Lowell, the great poet, if you ask them, you know, how did you come up with that? They say thing, well, the point is that.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we can put the unconscious to doing more work than it does. And you have to give it some material to work over. So I use my teaching technique, my seminar teaching technique, is I hand out thought questions one week, and that'll be what we'll focus on in the seminar next week. And my joke about that is this is somewhat like the thought questions you may have seen in other classes with the difference being that I expect you to have thought about these questions. Now, if I sit down just before class and write the thoughts questions out, they're not going to be very good. And the class is not going to be great”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a perfect example to bring to this. Those people are confabulating. The investigator has shown them something to the left eye and that gets incorporated in the person's thinking about what's going on. But it's not conscious. It's not been presented to the verbal hemisphere. So, yeah, it's exactly that. It's confabulation. We're confabulating all the time. So when somebody asks me why I did something, if it's a psychologist, I say, well, bear in mind who I am. I wrote all those articles about unconscious reasoning. So I don't really know why I did what I did, but I'll give you a story which sounds acceptable to me and will to you. Now you can only do this with psychologists. You can't just do this with Aunt Maud who will think you've finally lost it.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the investigator said, that's very clever. How did you happen to think of that? And again, this is another one of the studies that use psychology professors as subjects and one says, well, I thought of monkeys swinging through trees, across a river. The imagery occurred simultaneously with the solution. And you say, do you think it could have influenced you, the fact that I put the rope into motion? No, no, no, no, no. It's all about monkeys and rivers and swinging and so on. People have no idea why they were able to solve that problem. This is not just a curio. It turns out that the unconscious mind is going on solving problems all the time for free. We're not aware of what's going on, but it's... Happening, and that's great. Most of the stuff that goes on is accurate.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of my very favorite studies, you have people in a lab. There's two ropes hanging down from the ceiling. There's a bunch of objects lying around on the tables in there. And the experimenter says, I want you to tie the two ropes together. But the problem is they're too short to do that. So you have to find a way. And one way is very obvious you tie an extension cord to one and you go over and grab the other and you can now tie them together. And there are a lot of things like that. The experimenter says do it another way. Then, typically within forty-five seconds, the subject grabs a rope, ties a heavy object like pair of pliers to it, sets it moving like a pendulum, goes to the other rope, grabs the pendulum rope, and ties them together.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About what they're doing because they've forgotten some of the stuff they learned in books in a conscious way. And it's precisely because their masters is that they've invented it. They've induced certain rules that they're following, but they're hopeless. An example, an even simpler example is language. We don't know what grammar is. If you try to have people explain English grammar, they're hopeless. They can't say a single correct thing. But nevertheless, we rarely violate those rules. We just don't have a conscious grasp on what they are. We're constantly learning things, inducing things that we're not aware of in a conscious way, solving problems in an unconscious way.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Play their first chess game. They play, they make several moves, and then you ask them why you did that. And they can't tell you, I don't know. I just was moving things randomly. I don't know why I was doing that. And Simon says, no, actually they were following rules. It's called duffer's rules. Everybody plays the same way before they really have gotten any expertise at all. So then if they continue to play and they read books and they talk to other chess players, they are now beautifully cognizant of what's going on over there. They can tell you exactly why they move the rook to this position instead of the bishop and so on. And they're quite accurate. Then if you look at chess masters, I mean world-class players, they're no longer accurate.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the Nobel Prize winner economist organizational psychologist cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize. And for a while was going around saying, I do think aloud protocols. I have people solve problems and they think aloud. And that tells me the process that they're using to solve the problem. And my reaction will know it just says that they can tell you how their theory of how they would have solved the problem, which happens to correspond to your theory, but that that isn't necessarily what's going on. These studies establish that. And there was a controversy that went back and forth between Simon and me. And he actually gave me a beautiful example of this. He says, you know, when people”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we know that people have learned the rules because when you change the rules, they fall back down to chance level. Now you ask the subject, you say, tell me you were doing so great there and then it kind of say you kind of fell apart what happened and I said, well, I just lost the rhythm. You had psychology professors as some of the subjects and one of them said, well, I think you were showing me distracting symbols subliminally. So here are people learning rules that are quite complicated and no awareness that they've learned those rules at all.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, some of my favorite studies here about showing that we don't know what's going on in our heads. One beautiful one shows people a matrix of four cells up, down, right, left. And it tells the subject, I'm going to put an X on the computer screen in one of those quadrants. And I want you to predict where it's going to appear. Early on the subject does terribly and he gets better and better as time goes on. That's because there are rules that are determining where that x appears. It never appears in the same quadrant twice. It has to appear in quadrant two before it can appear in quadrant. etc complicated rule system”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went back and looked at some of the studies early in my career, and I was appalled at how few subjects I used, including the studies that I mentioned about externalizing arousal effects, ends of 12 per cell. And it's inappropriate. And over time, like everybody else, drifted to much larger numbers of cases than that. But now no one would ever use ends as low as most of us used, at least some of the time, decades ago. And there are other practices too, some good, some not so good, but the ones that are good, they're valuable. They have changed people's behavior.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the work is really very bad. On the other hand, I will say that that article started a movement to look at the practices of psychologists, research practices, and there have been a number of improvements. You're more likely, going back to the law of large numbers, you're more likely to get a spurious result if you use a small number of subjects because you may get something happening that isn't very likely to happen. You just use a small enough sample that you get it.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 10 or 20 studies attempting to replicate that effect and they don't find it. So that study just drops out. People stop referring to it. It doesn't work. It turns out that all of the studies that attempted to replicate this have a video camera on the person. The person knows that it is being watched. The whole point about this thing is that you're unaware in a conscious way of the fact that your facial expression has been manipulated and that's what allows the effect to occur. So sure enough when you do it with the video camera you don't get the effect when you do it without the video camera you do get the effect.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Let me give you an example. One thing that we haven't gotten onto is how incredibly much we are affected by small situational or contextual things in our lives that were affected unconsciously. One clever study, you have people hold a pencil in their mouth end of the pencil pointing in, which gives you kind of a sour puss look and feel when you do that, or you have them hold it between their teeth horizontal to the floor, which makes it you feel like you're smiling. And you have people look at cartoons under one of these conditions or the other, and sure enough, people who have been forced to smile think the cartoons are funnier. So then there's”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in fact, it's extremely misleading to talk about the replicability of randomly selected studies, let alone the replicability of implausible seeming studies, because I started asking people after this came out, can you think of any finding in psychology which seemed interesting and important when it came out that then turns out not to be the case and doesn't replicate? And people have to think for a while. I've only got a list of about a half dozen studies like that at this point. So that's enough to tell you we don't have a replicability problem. But if studies... Have been vetted appropriately. There's a very low rate of misinformation getting into the system.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they would feel about flubbing a question in college class, but people who and replicating this by somebody who makes an error in business, quite a different kind of thing. And if you improve on this situation, you'll get about 80% of people replicating. This simply asking the investigator of the studies, look, this is our understanding of what you did. Is that right? And they either say, yeah, go ahead, or no, you're missing something there. Just that gets it up to 80%.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be better than what the drug companies do, their replication rate is significantly lower than 50%. But the research was deeply flawed in many ways. For one thing, a lot of the studies were chosen because someone found the results to be implausible. So only 50% of the on their face of it implausible research got reproduced would be the way to describe what they did. But they did a lot of things that were astonishingly far from what the original investigators did. Italians were asked of opinions about African Americans. Well, they don't have the same understanding of African Americans in Italy that we People are asked”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, this is a matter of some passion for me, as you might imagine. Several years ago, a psychologist named Brian Nozick and a lot of other psychologists Published an article in 50 percent of the psychology experiments that they attempted to replicate actually did replicate. By the way, even if that were true, which it isn't,”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's just so important that early childhood education and to the policy thing, of course, in the Democrats 3.5 trillion hope, there is early childhood care for everybody. That's a huge investment. I mean, it's a hugely valuable investment, not to mention the human suffering and human well-being that are involved.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, they have daycare from, I don't see the word go And daycare, it's important, I mean a good daycare program is important for intelligence for sure with respect to specifically IQ. The very best daycare programs that we have may have an early effect. It tends to largely fade on IQ. But the Nobel Prize winning economist Heckman at University of Chicago has summarized the evidence of what happens to these kids 30 years. After they either have daycare or don't. And the difference is, I seem to be only telling you about really big effects today.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there is a huge difference between upper and lower class in Cogni skills. Some of that is undoubtedly genetic. I have no idea what fraction. But we know most of it is environmental. And this comes from studies of adoption. What happens to a kid from the lower class who gets adopted into a middle class family as compared to the kid who stays in the family of origin? And the answer is that's worth twelve to eighteen points an IQ. I mean, that's enormous. That's the difference between somebody who might or might not graduate from high school versus someone that you would expect with complete college and might well go on to postgraduate work. And that shows how important the environment is. And that's the end of the question. So what should...”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the lower class family, and this is intact, I mean, we're not talking about pathological. I mean, it's dad's a lunch pale dad and mom's a homemaker intact family. There isn't much in the way of conversation with a kid. You tell the kid what to do, and the kid asks you for something. And it's just not at all the same thing. There often is some reading in the lower class family. There may be some little golden books. I don't know if they still have those. Most of this research was initially done, those were common. And kid may get read to some. And they don't tend to go to museums. They don't have their information, their fiction of the top level, most interesting, most likely to be food for thought.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, all right questions. Is wonderful anthropological work that's gone on looking at where you just live with a family for a few weeks or months and see what goes on. In the upper middle class family, they typically eat dinner together. Dinner table conversation is kind of like a tennis game. I mean, dad says something and mom says something and the kid says something and the dad responds to what the kid said and so on. They learn how to think to a significant extent in family gatherings. These kids get taken to the museum, they get read to often by quite good books.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Scandinavia especially, the contribution of genes to IQ is just as great for the lower classes, people with the least money as it is the most money, because they're making sure that the poorest have good things going on in their environment, schooling and so on, so that genes can express themselves in the lower classes in Europe, especially Scandinavia So that's the most interesting thing I can say about genes and the environment.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And some environments, obviously lower class environments, are as good as you would ever find in an upper middle class, but some of the environments are chaotic in the extreme, and not much goes on that's going to facilitate somebody rising to their level of ability. And when the environment is massively different across individuals as it is in the lower classes, then it's the environment that's going to drive the bus. And the genes are not really much relevant. A little side point that I'll make here, and this is that this is true only in the US among rich countries.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this country, the contribution to IQ of genes of the lower class is practically zero. How could that possibly be? Well, because upper middle class families are all alike. They're like happy families. The happy families are all alike. Upper middle class families are all alike with respect to cognitive skill. They're very good and there's not that much variation. I mean, Lawyer Smith and”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wrote a book called Intelligence and How to Get It, which shows what's wrong with all of that. The arguments are pretty complicated in the case of, for example, how much of IQ is due to your genes. The most interesting thing I can say about it, first of all, I don't know what the contribution of genes is. I know it's less than 60, way less than 80% of the variation. And the most interesting and important thing I can say about genes and intelligence is that the contribution to the IQ of a population of upper middle class people only is about 80%. The variation that you see between people who were raised in upper middle class environments is largely variation that's produced by their genes.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They think that early childhood environment is not all that important unless it's their own kid and they've got to get, they're desperate to get him in the very best daycare situation, which is a mistake. They underestimate the lifetime learning opportunities that make us much smarter or not, as the case may be. They think that blacks and whites are separated in their IQ scores on the average by 15 points. They think, well, probably maybe some of that's genetic. They think Asians have higher IQs than people of European descent and so on. All of that is wrong.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well I had studied reasoning for many, many years. And if you're a psychologist, you sort of keep up on the literature on many fields, and one of them most psychologists know something about is intelligence, but for some reason, I got to thinking seriously about the intelligence literature. And the more I thought and the more I read, the more I realized that psychologists had gotten things desperately wrong with intelligence. And there's a book that has all these desperately wrong things in it. It's called The Bell Curve, and most of your listeners believe what the bell curve tells them. They believe that genetics accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the variation that you find in intelligence.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, I made up my mind I would go to the University of Michigan absolutely regardless of what happened when I was there because I had heard only good things about the university, about the psychology department, about the town, etc. I'm going to improve my wife and all of these ways, and I'm not going to pay any attention to the concrete data which I get. And that's a huge bias that we have. If I saw it, it must be real. Well, no, it might not be. You have better ways of finding out what an object is like than examining it yourself. That's what we have speech for and the ability to read. We can get information rather than relying on our own senses. And it was, in fact, the absolute right to say. For me, so I got what I deserved.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was at Yale, perfectly good university, and I went to Michigan despite the fact that the day of my interview, it was in February, Ann Arbor is not a lovely place in February, it may surprise you to know. And this was a particularly unlovely day because there was dirty, patchy snow lying all around. It's very cold. And I was interviewed by the executive committee of the department, and most of the time in the discussion was spent with them discussing baseball, which I know nothing about and isn't really relevant to my career. And I spent the bulk of my time, well not the bulk, but the single person I spent most time with is a colossal boar. But I went to the University of Michigan anyway.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's tragic that these things are rarely taught, certainly not in the way that we'll make contact with every other life events in high school. Instead, we make high school students take algebra, which they're not going to use.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of these things that the statistical rules, probabilistic rules, economic rules, psychological rules, none of these things are taught explicitly, nearly as much as they should be. I went and got after I did the study, I went and got an economics text to see what they did with the sunk cost. And both of them, they spoke of it only in business situations. They didn't say, oh, by the way, this principle is important to you every day in many, many ways, or the opportunity cost principle. They're not, they make no effort. And statistics courses make no effort to say, look, statistics is relevant all the time and probability. so on. So there are opportunities to greatly improve people's education. It won't affect their IQ, but it sure as heck makes them smarter.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After your first at bat, your average is either zero or one. So when you get more and more, but nobody really has a 450 level of ability, and that's going to show over the long haul. So, I mean, it goes from like 10% giving you that kind of answer to 70% giving you that kind of answer. I mean, college is hugely important for making you smarter Peter Thiel to the contrary, notwithstanding. And so I was bowled over by this. It's a tremendously strong effect. I mean, people go on average from answering 20% of our problems correctly to 70% of our problems correctly.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we looked at all of these kinds of things. Or you tell people, you know, at the end of the first couple of weeks, the baseball season, there are usually several batters with averages of 450 or higher. But no one ever finishes the season with that. Why do you suppose that is? Now, if you ask this question of a U of M freshman before he set foot in the classroom, he will say, and I'm making it he because he's more likely to know about baseball, he will say, well, you know, the pitchers make the necessary adjustments or they're doing so well, they kind of goof off and stop trying as hard. an education lasting four years at the University of Michigan, they're likely to say, well, wait a minute. Early on in the season, there haven't been that many at bats. Think about it.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I gave them a package of problems like that are solvable by using the sunk cost rule or the law of large numbers or the concept of statistical regression, which is that extreme events are not likely to be so extreme the next time they're encountered. We don't have that wired into us. I mean, it's a tremendously important principle that we, you know, it doesn't come with the hardware. All the software for that.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I was absolutely pathological. I mean, if I started, by God, I was going to finish it. And I don't know who told me that that's a good rule. I guess I just invented it myself. But of course, it's a perfectly terrible rule. Whatever point you're not enjoying or you're not learning, then you should stop. People don't have that principle at such a level of abstraction that it will make contact with all the problems in life that it should. But you teach them in the laboratory just a very few problems using one of these principles or actually just giving them the abstract principles. Either one will help people, and if you give them both, abstract and concrete cases, of course, they do even better. I decided to say, well, what does college do for you on these things”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't want to waste the money I paid to which an economist says honk wrong You can't waste that money You already wasted it All you can do now is send good money after bad You talk about this”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was doing that work, I used to say, you know, not only are we stupid, but you can't make us smarter with these things. So one day I said, well, you know, I'm going to prove that. I mean, I don't actually know for a fact that, you know, you can't teach people these things. To my astonishment, in 15 or 20 minutes, you can teach the law of large numbers, the regression principle, the cost-benefit principles, including crucially important one of Of the sunk cost principle that I can't retrieve money I've already spent by consuming something. So go to a movie and it's a lousy movie. I may say, well, this thing is hardly worth it. I just assume be sitting at home.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I wasn't so foolish as to think that weather isn't as variable in England as it is anywhere else, but I just didn't take the trouble to say, wait a minute, how much evidence do I really have about what the weather is? So any rate, I studied people's failure to apply the law of large numbers when they should. They're attributing causality when the data they have is purely correlational. I studied their inability to apply the regression, statistical regression concept to”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite example of somebody not using the law of large numbers and not understanding that the more variable the dimension you're looking at, the more data it's important to have to make a judgment. And this comes from what I went for the first time to Europe. I spent about a week in London, week or 10 days, and it was absolutely gorgeous weather. I mean, blue sky, 70 degrees every single day. And I came away some of the lingering feeling that, you know, the British are such complainters. They actually have wonderful weather, but they're always complaining about the rain. Well, I got what I deserved the next time I went to London. It never stopped raining the entire time.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I mean, you're going to go far away from 50% if there's three births per day because it's going to be either two-thirds three-thirds, boys. I mean, that's a case. We understand the law of large numbers, by the way, even hunter-gatherers understood the law of large numbers in a lot of important contexts. But we don't have it stored away as an abstract rule to any time there's a little light that goes on in our heads. Data, oh yeah, what's the N? What's the number of cases?”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people say it shouldn't make any difference. And about as many say it would be the larger hospital as would be the smaller hospital. In fact, it's astronomically more likely to happen at the smaller one, right? 15 births today.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So an example that I like is I have lots of my studies and lots of Tursky economist studies, by the way, had to do with showing the errors and reasoning that people make because they don't think statistically or probabilistically when they should. I mean, these habits of thought are not Common. We're not typically taught them in such a way that they can make contact with everyday life events. For example, one of their most famous studies is you say there's a town where there are two hospitals. One has about 15 births per day and the other has about 60 births per day. At which of these hospitals do you think there would be more days in the year when 60% or more of the births were boys?”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, it actually probably started with the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, you have a workforce that needs to be able to read and write and do arithmetic. So you start increasing the amount of schooling, introducing it, or if it's already there sort of in embryo, you enhance the education. And for the last 200 years, the amount of time that people spend in school is just kept on increasing. And this is hard to believe, but right after World War II, only about 6 or 8 percent of the population had a college degree. And college does make you smarter. And by the way, I have data about that if you want to hear about that. Sure. To my surprise, I really didn't. I just thought college teaches you stuff. I didn't realize it actually makes you smarter and lots of very important ways. It does.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a case of the particular thing that he lacked was ability to get along with people. But ambition is another thing that you often see of somebody that he's got the whole package, but it just doesn't care enough to put it all into play. There's a quote that makes this point, by the way, which I really love from Warren Buffett, who says, you know, investing is not a game where the smartest guy wins. If you've got an IQ of 160, you may as well sell 30 of those points because you're not going to need them.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I know someone who had a tested IQ of 184, and he was incredible. I mean, you didn't have to be with him for very long to realize, oh my God, this guy is really super, super smart. But he was slightly autistic. I mean, he was slightly off. He would make comments that were inappropriate, he would laugh when that wasn't the right reaction and so on. And he had a PhD from a major university, and he only managed to get very middling level jobs, academic jobs in his career. He should have been at a major university, and he was on very minor places.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, you have to have all those things to be a successful scientist. And my guess is that you have to have pretty much all those things to be a successful to be successful in business.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source