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.
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.