Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Daniel Kahneman

There is a podcast on the limits of intuition that was referenced over at Maggie's. I just listened to it on my walk and there are twenty good ideas in it.  Pretty good for 60+ minutes. Kahneman is actually in favor of what he calls "delayed intuition," in which you refrain from deciding and even distract yourself from deciding by gathering more data, then at the end, closing your eyes and making an intuitive judgement.  Unsurprisingly, this type of intuition results in better decisions than the first pass.

He also made specific reference to the reminder I recently got from Bethany, that we do not change our minds or become persuaded by facts so much as trust in a person who is telling us something.  Of course, their general ability to use facts will be part of our trusting them, but that can take many forms.  They might explain something we already agree with in a particularly good way. They might provide an explanation to us for something we have observed but did not quite have a handle on.  They might tie a new idea in to something we already know.  They might point out a deal-breaker we had overlooked. They might move us from point C to point D by describing how the general consesus went from A to B to C to D. Any of these increase trust in their judgement.

BTW, because of what is called the Endowment Factor, we are more likely to believe a speaker we have paid money to see or a book we have bought rather than been given us.

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