One of my favorite rules of thumb came from the Nichomachean Ethics where Aristotle said that in considering how much you should pay for a service rendered, you should consider how much it was worth to you before it was accomplished. Not sure it's a documented bias, but it should be: the universal tendency to underappreciate what we already have.
You lose power, the service has already been rendered but you've not been paid yet. You can't negotiate for payment by threatening to withhold service.
Same thing happens to freelance developers and why some add kill switches[1]. You deliver, the client then says "It's not quite what I asked for, I'll give you Nothing/10%/50%/80% of what we agreed".
Obviously it's worse for call girls as they can't take you to court in most countries, hence why they always ask for money up front. Their post-service negotiating position is extremely weak. So no money up front, no service.
[1] I personally think that as long as you make it clear to the client + part of the contract that they only have a temporary licence key until full-payment, kill switches are fine. Adding it on the sly is not.
This explains why Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" was such a hit. The easiest way to write a bestselling book is to tell people what they've heard a hundred times before.
It does call into question the feasibility of the book's objective of correcting human biases and cognitive errors. We've been trying to do that for 2500 years.
backing fairly common sense stuff with "actual research", like all things, can be done to excess
> Think of it like this: the takeaway of Bartels’ post is that something like a 1% exists. (It’s actually more like a 10% for the purposes of the study he cites.) I refer back to Occupy’s figuration for two reasons. One, I imagine that Bartels would be rather sympathetic to the liberal-progressivist ends to which this slogan was put, or at least not hostile. Two, it’s a figure that drew upon pop economic knowledge, that attempted to derive from the latter the kind of epistemic aura that numbers hold for Serious People. It would have been utterly natural for Bartels to have referred to this figure, to the social movement that buoyed it, to the knowledges that sustained it. Instead, he directs us to “a flurry of commentary” surrounding McCutcheon v. FEC, a case adjudicated well, well after Occupy. If Occupy was a movement touting an idea whose time had come, Bartels refuses to validate forms of knowing that know too soon, forms of knowing that short circuit the positivist time of coming-to-know with the punctuality of a deeply plebeian “Shit’s fucked up and bullshit!”
Both points are actually covered in the book, if I recall correctly. Kahneman writes something along the lines of Tversky or him remarking to the other that they were "just re-discovering things that their grandmother used to tell them."
Kahneman later writes that the only way to avoid cognitive biases that he's seen is to know them and be vigilant for them. And even that doesn't work a good deal of the time. I remember that passage being a very sobering part of the book.
I would say that the book is Kahneman's attempt to actually add to that 2500 year effort by making the observations more formalized, but available to a wider audience.
If you look ahead to a future age, and consider the state of literature after the printing press, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, you will find again a twofold division of labor. Some will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they will be by a hundred—a thousand—times as many more).
We don't know how much worse it might be without any attempts, and how much worse it can get when they cease.
> We've been trying to do that for 2500 years.
Who is "we" though? It's never everybody, right? So all this shows is that the few can't pick up the slack for everybody. Not everybody can be intelligent, but everybody can strive for more intellectual integrity than they currently have. That was true "then", and it will stay true always until the failure to follow through did us in.
'We' likely stands for the folk tale of Western intellectual history spanning the prime of ancient Greek philosophy to now (2500 years). Luckily, that history neither fully belongs to the West nor is the only one providing tractable ideas on human improvement
It could that biases are essential for survival of society as whole. Something that survived for sure for at least 2500 years cannot be just simple error of judgement.
Yes, Kahneman and Tversky are repeating insights Plato had 2500 years ago. But what they added was experimental verification that is helping persuade economists who have long mistakenly believed that human beings are far more rational than they really are.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I have a huge respect for the enduring legacy of Greek philosophy, and I too thought links in this article were extremely tenuous, and smacked of whatever the fallacy of appealing to ancient wisdom is called. Anyone who's read Plato's dialogues will find that one of their enduring hallmarks is how even the most intelligent and formidable interlocutors are eventually compelled at least to admit the weakness of their arguments within the course of a conversation, if not change their mind to the more persuasive character's (often Socrates') point of view on some profound subjects. It's actually a beautiful and instructive aspect of the literature, but it's an idealized progression of thought among well-educated men - not a realistic portrayal of the average person's psychological progression.
