Kahneman

[uznadze]

Has anyone read our recent Nobel laureate's new book on thinking fast and thinking slowly? What do you think?

[sigurdV]

Has anyone read our recent Nobel laureate's new book on thinking fast and thinking slowly? What do you think?

That you cant think fast while thinking slowly.

Did you read it? What do you think?

And welcome to Hypography!

[CraigD]

I’ve of course heard of, and am somewhat familiar with the writing and psychological experiments of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. I’ve not read any long book by either, including Kahneman’s 2011 Thinking Fast and Slow.

 

In the field of cognitive psych, I’m much more familiar with George Lakoff, having read his Philosophy in the Flesh and Moral Politics.

 

Having read no more than Jim Holt’s 25 Nov 2011 NYT review of it, I think I get TF&S’s title theme: that we humans use a “fast thinking system” for some tasks, and a “slow thinking” one for others.

 

As cognitive psychologists like Kahneman, and especially Lakoff take pains to make clear, these two “systems” are not intended to describe actual neurological systems, but are simplifying metaphors that, hopefully, accurately describe how our actual, complicated neurology works.

 

For myself, I find that a superficial summary of cognitive psyche popular writing is all I want, or feel well-time-spent in reading. Since my main psychological perspective is essentially “synthetic” – I’m interested primarily in writing software that “behaves” like a person – I find older work, especially by more computer science focused Marvin Minsky and Douglas Hofstadter, more valuable. Where cognitive psych/philosophy focused folk like Kahneman and Lakoff relate empirical psychological studies to various metaphors in impressive realistic ways, Minsky’s old stuff, while it doesn’t do a very good job of describing human behavior like buying cloths or voting for politicians, suggest some key algorithmic approaches to modeling it with computers.

 

:QuestionM Have you read TF&S, uznadze? How about the others I’ve mentioned? What’s your perspective?

[uznadze]

Ah, thank you. I'm reading Kahneman's book just now and am finding it very interesting. Kahneman's and Tverski's persistant discovery of one, then another, then yet another way in which humans' mental processes fail them always bothered me. One wondered how such an incompetent organism managed to evolve. But I think Kahneman's story about how and why that comes about is quite persuasive. I'll post a more detailed reaction once I've finished the book.

 

As to your AI objectives for cog psy you are, as you know, in very good company, and as you say, Minsky is a giant in that company. Do you remember his old book, The Society of Mind? IMO as the data from the new physiological psychology come in they make Minsky's model look better and better. And I think Lakeoff's ideas about the "embodied mind" are smart and right and fit well with an evolutionary approach to cognition, an approach I've come to adopt.