[PREV - ZION_FADES] [TOP]
KAHNEMAN_SLOWLY
July 15, 2012
Beginning with the first chapter of Kahneman's
"Thinking Fast and Slow", he shows us a photograph
of a woman making an angry face, and I immediately
thought he was going to point out it's instantly
obvious to us that this is an angry face, and in
this I was not disappointed.
He then goes on and tells a story about what the
likely reactions are to that angry face, but they
don't actually reflect my actual reactions, which
were conditioned by my knowledge that I'm reading
a psychology book.
He then presents an example of a multiplication
problem that's just difficult enough that to
solve so that most of us will need to engage in
a deliberate reasoning process to do it.
In this, he was quite correct in my own case,
but once again there were details he sketched
out in my likely mental processes that deviated
considerably from what I actually did.
In particular, in this case I went off into an
extensive side trip thinking about methods of
doing mental arithmetic, my history with
learning to do multiplication (rather poorly,
but getting by), Heinlein's complaint that
young children were no longer taught what used
to be standard fare (shortcuts for fast
mental arithmetic), and so on.
In particular, multiplying 17 x 24
suggests to me rounding up to 20 x 24, In all this mental
and then subtracting 3 x 24... this free association,
confines the more "mentally difficult" I screwed up the
operation to more manageable, smaller easy part, and
numbers. remembered the intermediate
result (480) wrong,
It raises some questions coming up with a final
about what we perceive as answer 200 high.
easy or difficult...
E.g. 20 is a "round As I said: I learned this
number" that's just 2x10, material poorly. I
a factor of two "easy completely lucked out
numbers"... that when I started
studying engineering,
calculators had a price
breakthrough and Stony
Brook changed their
policy to allow the use
of calculators on exams.
And it's pretty typical
of what happens when I
try to do "simple" mental
tasks... I get bored in
the middle and start
thinking about something
else. I have trouble
dialing an entire phone
number without multiple
tries.
EXPERIMENT_FAIL
Is there any great significance
to these minor discrepancies After all, his central point
between the way I think and still stands: there are
Kahneman apparently thinks I complex mental processes
think? Probably not. that are fast but unconcious
(or fast because they're
But this has me on guard, now unconcious?).
I'm watching the issue, I'm
wondering about Kahneman's
actual degree of insight...
Another side issue (at least I think it's a
side issue): I suspect that I'm pretty good at
this kind of self-conscious tracking of my own
thought processes. I worked on it quite a bit
beginning when I was 13 or so, filling many
pages of notebooks with my attempts at tracing
and recording how I got from one point to
another.
It would, of course,
be difficult to prove I think it's
whether my claim of also made me
ability in this area fairly good
is correct. at remembering
the flow of an
The way these things go, argument, and
it's likely that there remembering
are cases where a chain dialog.
of thought that I think
I know is at least a That's something
partial fabrication. that would be more
easily tested,
though I'll leave
it for now.
"We are blind and blind about our blindness."
-- Kahneman
--------
[NEXT - ONE_FOOT_IN_ZION]