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| Daniel Kahneman |
Steven Pinker:
DK's central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices, is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That's a powerful and important discovery.
My most recent book, The Better Angels of our Nature, is about the historic decline of violence, a fact that I argue is under-appreciated precisely because the human mind words the way Kahneman says it words, namely, that our sense of risk and danger is influenced by salient events that are available from memory. Our minds do not naturally process statistics on incidents of violence, and so Kahneman helps explain why my claim is news or why it's hard for people to believe. ....
We have our differences. I think he is a pessimist, whereas I am an optimist. I do think he's right that human nature saddles us with some unfortunate limitations, but I also think - and - actually he himself shows in the "slow thinking" part of his book - that we have the means to overcome some of our limitations, through education, through institutions, through enlightenment. It will always be a flaw, human nature will always push back, but gradually, bit by bit, with two steps forward one step back, I think that our better angels can push back against our limitations and flaws.
Thinking, Fast and Slow us an interesting capstone to his career, but his accomplishments were solidified well in advance of writing it and they'd have been just as significant without the book. His work really is monumental in the history of thought.
Richard Thaler
Richard Thaler is a behavioural economist and co-author of the bestseller Nudge, which explores how individuals and governments can influence people to make choices.
Danny is warm and moderate but also, inside himself, highly volatile,. He quit writing this book at least a dozen times. And I had to convince him not to quit, n+1 times. He genuinely didn't think anybody would buy it. It was a biased forecast - he prides himself of being a pessimist. He was shocked that it did so well and he's still in shock. He didn't think it would sell more than a million copies worldwide.
Certainly his work has to be viewed as one of the most important accomplishments of 20th century science. it's hard to think of any psychologist whose work has influenced so many different fields.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Risk engineering professor and author of he bestselling book The Black Swan, about the problems created by rare events.
The first idea Danny gave me in Rome is that people do not perceive stand-alone objects, rather differences away from an anchor point. He said that it was not cultural: even the vision of babies was based on identifying variations. It was simply more economical for the brain to do so. Investors are more effected by changes in wealth than by wealth itself and they are very sensitive to the way information is presented to them; ... They just take a benchmark and react to variations from it. So one could make them react more rationally by modifying the anchor.
Salley Vickers
Former psychotherapist and novelist.Daniel Kahneman's lucid and witty accounts (backed by thorough research) of our apparently innate tendency to risk-aversion reveals the crucial link between economics and psychology.
it also underlines our problem with rationality. We are no less keen, it seems, on abandoning hopeless endeavours than we are at taking risks. [She means we are reluctant to do both, because we think of the time/money invested in our hopeless endeavour and cannot bring ourselves to write it off.] Ultimately, Kahneman demonstrates, we are not rational creatures but instinctive ones and any attempt to make us act rationally must take that inbuilt bias into account or fail.
...his insight that financial success has more to do with random chance than planning. The rise and fall of businesses has little to do with who runs them and much to do with a natural statistic - failure of any kind is usually, that is to say statistically, followed by success. ...his dismissal of financial advisers and insurance policies, confirming my ignorant but it turns out accurate prejudice, made me rejoice that I never buy into these.
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