Crackpots Work Alone
RIP, Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman died recently at age 90. He lived a remarkable life. As a child, he escaped the Nazis in France with his family before moving to Israel. After graduate school in the United States, he became an eminent scientist, eventually winning a Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his founding work in behavioral economics, by which he became the world’s leading authority on human error. His long-time collaboration with Amos Tversky, with whom he surely would have shared the Nobel had Tversky not been taken by cancer at age 59 (Nobels are not awarded posthumously), was one of the great partnerships in the history of science.
“Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs – a joint mind that was better than our separate minds,” Kahneman wrote in his Nobel autobiography.
Writing for Public Discourse, Jamie Boulding laid out a vision for this sort of intellectual friendship that has largely been lost in public life today. “Two of the greatest figures in the history of science, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, were both introverts who associated being alone with thinking clearly,” Boulding wrote.
“The image of the academic secluded in his ivory tower, or the scientist sequestered in her laboratory, looms large in our cultural imagination. With the enforced isolation of COVID-19, the growth of remote working, and the emergence of powerful AI tools like ChatGPT, we increasingly reduce intellectual pursuits to little more than private projects. It was not always this way. Intellectual friendship – the idea that the best way to think clearly is to think together – has been foundational throughout philosophical history. Plato’s works are presented in dialogue form, suggesting that truth-seeking is communal, cooperative, and best practiced within relationships of friendship and love. …Today, how many people think of the intellectual life primarily in terms of fellowship, friendship, and love? Somehow, it has come to be seen in terms of what we know rather than who or what we are – or, as a philosopher might put it, in terms of epistemology rather than ontology.”
In his widely praised memoir of his life and work, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman described how he and Tversky worked together to create behavioral economics as an important field of study and provided a tour of the mind, too. Before Kahneman and Tversky, the dominant economic model saw people as rational utility maximizers. Instead, they demonstrated that our judgments err in predictable ways (biases), and we often rely on mental shortcuts to make decisions (heuristics).
Most of the mental glitches behavioral economics describes are interesting and often entertaining, but they don’t move the needle much in terms of overall impact. One, on the other hand, threatens us with disaster every day: confirmation bias.
By this point, most of us have at least a passing knowledge of behavioral finance’s lead actor, whereby we see what we want to see, accept these desires as truth, and act accordingly. What we “find” is often what we wanted or expected to find all along. It explains why the average man claims to have slept with 14 women while the average woman says she has slept with seven men.
When we come across some piece of information that confirms our priors, we generally assume it’s true. If we question it, it’s only to ask if it can be true. If a piece of information disconfirms our priors, we often miss or ignore it. If we pay attention to it at all, it’s merely to consider whether it must be true, a far different and more forgiving standard. We typically end up with what Kahneman called “the stubborn persistence of challenged beliefs.”
When we grab a glass of what we think is apple juice, only to take a sip and discover that it’s ginger ale, we react with disgust, even when we love the soda.
As Oxford’s Teppo Felin pointed out, “what people are looking for – rather than what people are merely looking at – determines what is obvious.”
Attend a youth sporting event this weekend and you will find bleachers full of parents convinced that little Sammy is destined for athletic glory. When Sammy’s play doesn’t seem to justify the forecast, the problem is the coach. Or the ref. Or injury. Or playing conditions. Or bad luck. It’s never Sammy.
Once you start seeing confirmation bias you’ll see it everywhere.
Confirmation bias provides the foundation for the premise of Thinking, Fast and Slow.
“The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
This failing – this reality – is bias blindness, our inability or unwillingness, even if and when we see it in others, to see the biases that beset us. As Jesus said: “It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own.”
Warren Buffett put it really well. “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” And who better to illustrate it than Dr. Sheldon Cooper?
Our errors, weaknesses, and foibles are mostly opaque to us. They leave no cognitive trace. On our better days, we might grudgingly concede that we hold views that are wrong. The problem is in providing current examples.
Shortly after Thinking, Fast and Slow came out, I was able to ask Kahneman what we could do to mitigate or overcome our biases. He chuckled and replied, “Not much.” He then suggested that our best chance of overcoming our inherent biases is for us to ask the best and smartest people we know to tear our ideas apart. In other words, the best advice is to “[s]low down, sleep on it, and ask your most brutal and least empathetic close friends for their advice.”
As Kahneman told The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig: “Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have thousands of people who can tell you you’re wrong?”
Accordingly, Kahneman developed what has come to be known as “adversarial collaboration.” When other scientists came to different conclusions than Kahneman, he often reached out to work together to try to resolve the discrepancy. Increased understanding, good papers, and friendship often ensued (examples here).
In sports, which is a ruthless, results-dominated business (being wrong can cost you your job overnight), “collaboration” rules the day. Thanks to the ready availability and accessibility of video, no cooperation is necessary.
“In football, ideas form in one building, are borrowed by another and continue to evolve based on a team’s personnel and staff. Some concepts are solved by scheme; others are ‘unsolvable’ because of the abilities of the players who run them. With the help of technology and a generation of coaches and players driven toward innovation, that cycle happens faster than ever.”
“I’m not too ashamed to say that I steal from anybody if I think it’s a good idea, I don’t care,” said Green Bay Packers Head Coach Matt LaFleur. “I’m trying to get inspiration from watching others and how they use maybe a specific player or, you know, to try to come up with plays or ideas that are going to help our players be their best.”
The Kahneman legacy is powerful, varied, and illuminating. His insights provide fodder for the rest of this week’s TBL. May he rest in peace.
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Crackpots Work Alone
In a talk I heard him give some years ago, virologist David Baltimore, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1975 for his work on the genetic mechanisms of viruses, commented that over the years (and especially while he was president of CalTech) he had received many manuscripts claiming to have solved some great scientific problem or to have overthrown the existing scientific paradigm to provide some grand theory of everything. Most prominent scientists have drawers full of similar submissions, almost always from people who work alone and outside of the scientific community.
We shouldn’t be surprised that none of the “research” provided to Baltimore offered anything remotely close to what was claimed; he provided some fascinating insight into why he thinks that’s so. At its best, he noted, good science is a collaborative, community effort. On the other hand, “crackpots work alone.”
Those who have little trust in society’s institutions and are anxious to confirm their priors can easily find plenty to reinforce their skepticism. All they need is a computer and an internet connection. Professor Google will do the rest. Moreover, multiple large academic studies have shown that online “research” to evaluate the truthfulness of misinformation “actually increases the probability of believing” it.
As Kahneman said, “The power of reasons is an illusion. The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion.”
The result is that there is both a large supply and a big demand for nonsense, appealingly framed. After all, internet businesses are financially incentivized not for truth, but for keeping their users engaged. You do that by giving the people what they want.
“A little learning,” as the poet Alexander Pope wrote in 1709, “is a dangerous thing.” He’s still right. Once we gain a bit of alleged “knowledge,” right or wrong, we quickly decide we have real expertise. That there are all too many legitimate complaints about advice provided by supposed authorities makes the problem even more difficult to mitigate.
Working collaboratively and in community lessens the likelihood that our work will be fraught with the bias to which we are so prone and increases the likelihood that all analysis and any conclusions drawn therefrom will be questioned, checked, and tested (and even more so when the checking is done by an adversary).
A “sequestered scientist” is the exception, not the rule.
Of course, in this context, “collaborative” must mean that there is a free and uninhibited exchange of ideas, viewpoints, and conclusions. It most decidedly is not a bunch of people agreeing vehemently with the boss or those with a seal of approval from the boss (I’m looking at you, Ray Dalio). In both the scientific and the investment process, principled, data-driven questioning and even disagreement should not only be tolerated, it also needs to be encouraged. Only then can some approximation of truth (or at least reality) be an expected outcome.
Still, nobody likes to be wrong.
Daniel Engber recently explored Kahneman’s beautiful legacy of wrongness in The Atlantic.
“[H]e was a great observer of his own mistakes. He declared his wrongness many times, on matters large and small, in public and in private. He was wrong, he said, about the work that had won the Nobel Prize. He wallowed in the state of having been mistaken; it became a topic for his lectures, a pedagogical ideal. Science has its vaunted self-corrective impulse, but even so, few working scientists—and fewer still of those who gain significant renown – will ever really cop to their mistakes. Kahneman never stopped admitting fault. He did it almost to a fault. Whether this instinct to self-debunk was a product of his intellectual humility, the politesse one learns from growing up in Paris, or some compulsion born of melancholia, I’m not qualified to say. What, exactly, was going on inside his brilliant mind is a matter for his friends, family, and biographers. Seen from the outside, though, his habit of reversal was an extraordinary gift. Kahneman’s careful, doubting mode of doing science was heroic. He got everything wrong, and yet somehow he was always right.”
As Dr. Baltimore emphasized, “Science is about changing our understanding of something by investigating its behavior.” In this sense, investigating includes analysis, testing, reaching tentative conclusions, and then repeating – perhaps again and again. If what we think cannot be substantiated by data, evidence, and experience, we have no business claiming it to be true or acting as if it were true, no matter how intuitive, elegant, or sales-worthy it may be.
Few have done that as well as Daniel Kahneman.
Totally Worth It
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College basketball phenom Caitlin Clark is one of the best players in the country – man or woman. She’s the highest-scoring NCAA basketball player of all time, and, at 21 years old, trying to “see the gulf between her potential and her reality and close that distance,” Wright Thompson reported in a thoughtful profile for ESPN.
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Benediction
We live on “a hurtling planet,” the poet Rod Jellema informed us, “swung from a thread of light and saved by nothing but grace.” To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers grace and hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Issue 169 (April 5, 2024)