In memory of Daniel Kahneman, who accelerated our understanding of the mind

March 27, 2024

Photo by Andreas Weigend on Flickr. Cropped but otherwise unaltered. Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

I'm not a person who has idols, but Daniel Kahneman came about as close as it gets for me. It is not an exaggeration to say that he revolutionized our understanding of the mind. Among many other concepts, Kahneman and his collaborators came up with the ideas of: Anchoring (where an irrelevant number can influence our judgments) Prospect theory (a theory of how we make judgments when there is uncertainty that incorporates a number of biases) The focusing illusion (where we overempha...

Intersecting advice from highly successful people

January 26, 2021

Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash

It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...