(2021-05-23) Gelman Thinking Fast Slow And Not At All System3 Jumps The Shark

Andrew Gelman: Thinking fast, slow, and not at all: System 3 jumps the shark.

By now, we’re all familiar with the three modes of thought. From wikipedia:
System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional.
System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
System 3 is when you say things that sound good but make no sense.

System 3 can get activated when you trust what someone tells you rather than figuring it out yourself

I thought about this after someone pointed out this post by Rachael Meager, who pointed out this erroneous claim in the new book, Noise, by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein.

The question is, how could the authors of this book have made such a clear mistake?

To answer this question, we can turn to Cass Sunstein, one of the authors, who in an interview about the book says:
When a forecaster is wrong, we think, “Why did they make that mistake?” The better question is: “Why did we think they could get that one right?”

The authors of this new book are a psychologist, a law professor, and some dude who describes himself as “a professor, writer and keynote speaker specializing in the quality of strategic thinking and the design of decision processes.” Between them, there’s no reason to think they’d have any particular expertise in correlation, causation, or statistics.

The relevant skill for Kahneman here was not to be an expert on statistics or econometrics but rather to realize that his coauthors are not experts either.

So I think the answer to Sunstein’s question, “Why did we think they could get that one right?”, is that, like that famously well-dressed emperor, they were surrounded by yes-men. And remember that Sunstein’s earlier reaction to being questioned was to liken the skeptics to the former East German secret police

We discussed this general issue a few years ago in the context of the unstable mix of skepticism and trust that was characteristic of the Freakonomics franchise.

The trust came because, after their first book, which was mostly based on author Levitt’s research, the Freaknomics franchise pretty much ran out of original research and was reduce to promoting the work of Levitt’s friends and various randos on the internet.

The question then arises, how is it that luminaries such as Philip Tetlock, Max Bazerman, Robert Cialdini, Rita McGrath, Annie Duke, Angela Duckworth, Adam Grant, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Levitt, and Esther Duflo thought this book was so brilliant, essential, masterful, eye-opening, important, etc

The simplest answer to this question is that the book really is wonderful, it just has this one little mistake. Noise is indeed an important subject, and three authors who don’t understand correlation and causation can still write an excellent book on the topic

In the above-linked interview, Sunstein says a few other things that bother me.

What really bothered me, though, was when Sunstein said:
Unlike bias, noise isn’t intuitive, which is why we think we’ve discovered a new continent.

At first I thought this was weird because, who does this guy think he is, Christopher Columbus? Also everybody knows about noise. I can’t expect Sunstein et al. to have heard of W. Edwards Deming and the quality control revolution, but he’s heard of Fischer Black, right?

But then I realized that Sunstein kinda is like Columbus, in that he’s an ignorant guy who sails off to a faraway land, a country that’s already full of people, and then he goes back and declares he’s discovered the place.

The question comes up in this sort of post: Why bother? Why should I care? I’m not completely sure, but one thing that bothers me about the nudgelords is that they’re going around telling everybody else what to do—or, more precisely, advertising their services to world leaders who can use their techniques to nudge us into doing stuff that they, the leaders, want us to do—but they don’t have their own house in order.

I’m sure that my above post is unfair in the sense that these three people spent several years working hard on a book, and I’m basing my entire reaction on some combination of the title, a technical error that someone found, and an interview where one of the authors was maybe a bit too relaxed.

Kahneman replies in comments below, and there are several responses. His work has been very influential in my thinking, both about statistics and about science, and I appreciate his taking the time to comment.