Steve Reads

Daniel Kahneman’s autobiography, written on the occasion of his winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, makes for great reading. I was particularly taken by his idea of “adversarial collaboration,” which you can find maybe 90% of the way into the autobiography. The idea is that there’s something quite defective in the way that scholarly publishing happens: someone presents an idea, a critic thrashes it, and the original author responds by giving absolutely no ground to his critic. This goes back and forth for a few rounds; at no point was anyone willing to change his mind, and indeed the process encourages further entrenchment.

I can’t testify to the truth or falsehood of that claim for academic scholarship, but it’s certainly true of public debating in this country. I even noticed it, on the smallest scale, on the debate team in high school. We lost points for ceding any point to our opponent. Any debates I’ve had on the web or mailing lists have followed the same pattern. When you’re competing in front of others, any point of contention on which you compromise counts as a loss. Kahneman’s attempts to find a process that avoids this whole unproductive mess are laudable.

His description of a years-long paper-writing process smacks against what some of my college professors told me about academic publishing. They complained that publication is so competitive that you’re encouraged to put out a half-baked or small idea, rather than taking the time to let the idea blossom into a deep, complete paper. I’m curious whether academics have changed since Kahneman and Tversky worked on their foundational papers, whether disciplinary standards are different in their field, or whether Kahneman is just leaving out the intermediary steps — say, subsidiary papers that he published along the way.

Finally, it’s interesting to read Kahneman’s account of his fight with Gerd Gigerenzer. Gigerenzer’s book Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart came highly recommended from Cosma Shalizi, and it didn’t disappoint; it’s a sustained argument, backed by lots of experimental evidence, that many mental processes which may seem initially irrational turn out to be “ecologically rational,” in the sense that they work well under the variable conditions that we find in nature. Whereas many results about optimality or economic rationality depend on rather precise conditions holding, ecologically rational ones are not sensitive to violations in the assumptions.

In particular, Simple Heuristics sets itself firmly against Kahneman and Tversky. The latter are famous for having introduced “heuristics and biases” — i.e., places where human behavior is irrational, in a way that makes even the experimental subjects themselves blush. I only have the barest connection to the debate, but Gigerenzer seems to believe that Kahneman and Tversky have given heuristics and biases a bad name, whereas he (Gigerenzer) believes they’re ecologically valuable. Kahneman, in turn, seems to believe that he’s been given a bad rap, and that heuristics and biases shouldn’t be viewed all that negatively.

What’s more interesting about the debate, it seems to me, is that it illustrates the point that Kahneman was making about adversarial collaboration; I’m pretty sure this is one of the main reasons he included the debate with Gigerenzer in his autobiography. At no point does it seem as though Gigerenzer is willing to budge in his debate with Kahneman, because his academic credibility depends on his winning a pissing contest. Kahneman is in a nice spot writing this autobiography, in that he’s just won a Nobel and can look like the high-road-taking elder statesman of psychology, and can cast Gigerenzer as an uncompromising ass. I leave it to others who have more familiarity with the debate to let me know whether this characterization is accurate.

All of the above said, I would like to make a strong recommendation for Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. Along with Herb Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial (another Cosma recommendation, natch), it forms a great rebuttal of economically-rational man.

(Incidentally, my friend Nina worked under Kahneman a few years ago, and told me that his preferred introduction to the subject is The Winner’s Curse, by his colleague Dick Thaler.)