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The Atlantic
Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realize How Wrong You Are
I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I’d applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. “Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure,” he’d later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That had been the first finding in his long career as a psychologist: As a young recruit in the Israel Defense Forces, he’d assessed and overhauled the pointless 15-to-20-minute chats that were being used for sorting soldiers into different units. And yet there he and I were, sitting down for a 15-to-20-minute chat of our own.I remember he was sweet, smart, and very strange. I knew him as a founder of behavioral economics, and I had a bare familiarity with the work on cognitive biases and judgment heuristics for which he was soon to win a Nobel Prize. I did not know that he’d lately switched the focus of his research to the science of well-being and how to measure it objectively. When I said during the interview that I’d been working in a brain-imaging lab, he began to talk about a plan he had to measure people’s level of delight directly from their brain. If neural happiness could be assessed, he said, then it could be maximized. I had little expertise—I’d only been a lab assistant—but the notion seemed far-fetched: You can’t just sum up a person’s happiness by counting voxels on a brain scan. I was chatting with a genius, yet somehow on this point he seemed … misguided?I still believe that he was wrong, on this and many other things. He believed so, too. Daniel Kahneman was the world’s greatest scholar of how people get things wrong. And he 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.In 2011, he compiled his life’s work to that point into Thinking, Fast and Slow. Truly, the book is as strange as he was. While it might be found in airport bookstores next to business how-to and science-based self-help guides, its genre is unique. Across its 400-plus pages Kahleman lays out an extravagant taxonomy of human biases, fallacies, heuristics, and neglects, in the hope of making us aware of our mistakes, so that we might call out the mistakes that other people make. That’s all we can aspire to, he repeatedly reminds us, because mere recognition of an error doesn’t typically make it go away. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available, and cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognize than perceptual illusions,” he writes in the book’s conclusion. “The voice of reason may be much fainter than the loud and clear voice of an erroneous intuition.” That’s the struggle: We may not hear that voice, but we must attempt to listen.Kahneman lived with one ear cocked; he made errors just the same. The book itself was a terrific struggle, as he said in interviews. He was miserable while writing it, and so plagued by doubts that he paid some colleagues to review the manuscript and then tell him, anonymously, whether he should throw it in the garbage to preserve his reputation. They said otherwise, and others deemed the finished book a masterpiece. Yet the timing of its publication turned out to be unfortunate. In its pages, Kahneman marveled at great length over the findings of a subfield of psychology known as social priming. But that work—not his own—quickly fell into disrepute, and a larger crisis over irreproducible results began to spread. Many of the studies that Kahneman had touted in his book—he called one an “instant classic” and said of others, “Disbelief is not an option”—turned out to be unsound. Their sample sizes were far too small, and their statistics could not be trusted. To say the book was riddled with scientific errors would not be entirely unfair.If anyone should have caught those errors, it was Kahneman. Forty years earlier, in the very first paper that he wrote with his close friend and colleague Amos Tversky, he had shown that even trained psychologists—even people like himself—are subject to a “consistent misperception of the world” that leads them to make poor judgments about sample sizes, and to draw the wrong conclusions from their data. In that sense, Kahneman had personally discovered and named the very cognitive bias that would eventually corrupt the academic literature that he cited in his book.In 2012, as the extent of that corruption became apparent, Kahneman intervened. While some of those whose work was now in question grew defensive, he put out an open letter calling for more scrutiny. In private email chains, he reportedly goaded colleagues to engage with critics and to participate in rigorous efforts to replicate their work. In the end, Kahneman admitted in a public forum that he’d been far too trusting of some suspect data. “I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through,” he wrote. He acknowledged the “special irony” of his mistake.Kahneman once said that being wrong feels good, that it gives the pleasure of a sense of motion: “I used to think something and now I think something else.” He was always wrong, always learning, always going somewhere new. In the 2010s, he abandoned the work on happiness that we’d discussed during my grad-school interview, because he realized—to his surprise—that no one really wanted to be happy in the first place. People are more interested in being satisfied, which is something different. “I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do,” he told Tyler Cowen in an interview in 2018. “Happiness feels good in the moment. But it’s in the moment. What you’re left with are your memories. And that’s a very striking thing—that memories stay with you, and the reality of life is gone in an instant.”The memories remain.
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theatlantic.com
Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel’s Worst Prime Minister Ever
One man’s ambition has undermined Israel’s security and consumed its politics.
theatlantic.com
The Fantasy of a Truly Free Life
In Lisa Ko’s ambitious, messy novel, characters disappear, sell out, and opt out, all in search of a meaningful existence.
theatlantic.com
Baltimore Lost More Than a Bridge
You could see the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Fort McHenry, the pentagon-shaped keep that inspired the bridge’s namesake to write the verses that became our national anthem. You could see it from the pagoda in Patterson Park, another strangely geometric landmark from which I’ve cheered on teams at Baltimore’s annual kinetic-sculpture race. You could see it from the top of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the city’s biggest employer. This morning, my husband sent me a photo of the familiar view out his window at work—now dominated not by the soaring bridge, but by a hulking container ship, halted in the middle of the water with metal strewn over and around it.Videos of the bridge’s collapse are stunning. At about 1:30 a.m., the ship, called the Dali, lost power and crashed into one of the bridge’s central pillars. Within 15 seconds, the straight line of the bridge’s span bends and breaks, and the entire structure tumbles into the harbor.The bridge was one of only three roadways crossing Baltimore’s defining waterways, and until this morning, each of those routes served its own purpose. The I-95 tunnel, which cuts across the mouth of the harbor, was for people commuting between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The famously congested Baltimore Harbor Tunnel—part of I-895—passed beneath the Patapsco River and is for people bypassing the city completely. The Key Bridge, farther down the river toward the Chesapeake Bay, handled the least traffic of the three. But it was part of the Baltimore Beltway, the circular highway that forms the unofficial boundary of the Baltimore metro area and shuttles into the city to help make it run. Of the three routes, the Key Bridge was the most visible and beautiful, standing alone above the water in a long, graceful arch.[David A. Graham: Why ships keep crashing]Officials had enough notice of the Dali’s distress that it blocked cars from entering the bridge before its collapse, but Maryland’s transportation secretary told reporters this morning that the department was searching for six missing construction workers who may have fallen into the 48-degree water. The crew was working to fix potholes—to keep Baltimore’s beat-up roads in good enough shape to keep traffic flowing into the city. Two workers have already been pulled from the water, one of whom was in such bad shape that they couldn’t be asked what happened. As of about 10:08 a.m., no one but the construction crew was believed to have fallen into the water. But had the collapse happened a few hours later, hundreds of people might well be dead: On average, about 31,000 cars and trucks cross the bridge every day.The cars, for now, can be rerouted. But the remnants of the bridge (not to mention the Dali) are blocking the city’s waterways for any other ships that are scheduled to enter. Baltimore is now America’s 17th-biggest port by tonnage—a respectable rank, if a far cry from the early days of the United States, when shipping made the city the third-most-populous in the country—and may well drop further down the list if the harbor remains inaccessible. (Maryland Governor Wes Moore has yet to comment on when the port might reopen for business.) But Baltimore is a city defined by water. The Gwynns Falls and the Jones Falls trickle through our parks. The Inner Harbor is our Times Square; our economy is tied up in trade and transportation. Ships are in the city’s bones. The brackish harbor is in its heart.Baltimore is also a city that can’t catch a break, full of people who find joy in its absurdities. The Trash Wheel Family—a set of four solar and hydro-powered, googly-eyed machines that keep litter in the city’s rivers from entering the harbor—are local celebrities. Every week, a group of magnet-fishers meets at the harbor to pluck benches, scooters, and other treasures from the water, proudly displaying their haul along the sidewalk. Every year, bicycle-powered moving sculptures shaped like dragons and dogs and fire trucks compete to paddle down a short stretch of the harbor without capsizing. But no one ever really forgets that the harbor itself is visibly polluted, that much of the city’s infrastructure is breaking and broken, that the state has held back funding to fix it, that Baltimore’s mayoral administrations have been riddled with corruption, that people are still getting by on too little, that the murder rate is still too high.[Read: The aftermath of the Baltimore bridge collapse]Baltimore Harbor is one of the city’s most important links to the rest of the world; to cut it off is to clog our blood supply. Moore has already said that the bridge will be rebuilt to honor this morning’s victims. We can still get out of the city with trains and cars. But this morning, Baltimore feels that much more claustrophobic. Looking out toward the Chesapeake used to be an exercise in optimism, in feeling all the possibilities of being connected to the wider world and the terrifyingly wide swell of the Atlantic. Today, it’s an exercise in mourning and resolve.
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theatlantic.com