[tt] A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING: A "Master Class" By Danny Kahneman

[Michael LaTorra]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kahneman07/kahneman07_index.html
*A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING: A "Master Class" By Danny
Kahneman*

John Brockman writes:

Recently, I spent several months working closely with Danny Kahneman, the
psychologist who is the co-creator of behavioral economics (with his late
collaborator Amos Tversky), for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in
2002.

My discussions with him inspired a 2-day "Master Class" given by Kahneman
for a group of twenty leading American business/Internet/culture
innovators—a microcosm of the recently dominant sector of American
business—in Napa, California in July. They came to hear him lecture on his
ideas and research in diverse fields such as human judgment, decision making
and behavioral economics and well-being.

While Kahneman has a wide following among people who study risk,
decision-making, and other aspects of human judgment, he is not exactly a
household name. Yet among many of the top thinkers in psychology, he ranks
at the top of the field.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (*Stumbling on Happiness*) writes:
"Danny Kahneman is simply the most distinguished living psychologist in the
world, bar none. Trying to say something smart about Danny's contributions
to science is like trying to say something smart about water: It is
everywhere, in everything, and a world without it would be a world
unimaginably different than this one." And according to Harvard's Steven
Pinker (*The Stuff of Thought*): "It's not an exaggeration to say that
Kahneman is one of the most influential psychologists in history and
certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has made seminal
contributions over a wide range of fields including social psychology,
cognitive science, reasoning and thinking, and behavioral economics, a field
he and his partner Amos Tversky invented."

Here are some examples from the national media which illustrate how
Kahneman's ideas are reflected in the public conversation:

In the *Economist* "Happiness & Economics " issue in December, 2006,
Kahneman is credited with the new hedonimetry regarding his argument that
people are not as mysterious as less nosy economists supposed. "The view
that hedonic states cannot be measured because they are private events is
widely held but incorrect."

Paul Krugman, in his *New York Times *column, "Quagmire Of The Vanities"
(January 8, 2007), asks if the proponents of the "surge" in Iraq are cynical
or delusional. He presents Kahneman's view that "the administration's
unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to
cutting one's losses—the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the
table, hoping to break even."

His articles have been picked up by the press and written about extensively.
The most recent example is Jim Holt's lede piece in *The New York Times
Magazine*, "You are What You Expect" (January 21, 2007), an article about
this year's *Edge* Annual Question "What Are You Optimistic About?". It was
prefaced with a commentary regarding Kahneman's ideas on "optimism bias".

In Jerome Groopman's *New Yorker* article, "What's the trouble? How Doctors
Think" (January 29, 2007), Groopman looks at a medical misdiagnosis through
the prism of a heuristic called "availability," which refers to the tendency
to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples
come to mind. This tendency was first described in 1973, in Kahneman's paper
with Amos Tversky when they were psychologists at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.

Kahneman's article (with Jonathan Renshon) "Why Hawks Win" was published in
*Foreign Policy *(January/February 2007); Kahneman points out that the
answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making
biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. The article
takes a look at why the tough guys win more than they should. Publication
came during the run up to Davis, and the article became a focus of numerous
discussions and related articles.

The event was an unqualified success. As one of the attendees later wrote:
"Even with the perspective a few weeks, I can still think it is one of the
all time best conferences that I have ever attended."

Over a period of two days, Kahneman presided over six sessions lasting about
eight hours. The entire event was videotaped as an archive. *Edge* is
pleased to present a sampling from the event consisting of streaming video
of the first 10-15 minutes of each session along with the related verbatim
transcripts.

—JB <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html>


DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton
University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic
Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological
research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and
decision-making under uncertainty.
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