While sending an email you are likely to underestimate the number of *other* emails the recipient will be getting. A modern cognitive bias.
via While sending an email you are likely to… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Relevent, especially:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.
The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.
The effect is about paradoxical defects in cognitive ability, both in oneself and as one compares oneself to others.
via Who you gonna believe, me or you own eyes? « Science-Based Medicine.
Only this bit of NNT, but lots of Khaneman, Tversky, Thaler etc. as well, in this excellent article.
It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas. As the trader turned epistemologist Nassim Taleb says: “We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.” But readers of popular psychology books on rationality must recognize that there’s a lot they don’t know, and they must be beware of how seductive stories are. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.
RIP Danny. Thank you for your insights and stories. I’m glad of the opportunity to know your work. You made a difference.
[Update 9/8/2010 A paper Danny co-authored, “Income’s Influence on Happiness” has just been released.]
… the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Daniel Kahneman KNOWS that the first thought that entered your head was $.10–even if you’re a Computer Science major at MIT. But that’s the wrong answer.
Daniel Gilbert’s “Stumbling On Happiness” led me to Nicholas Taleb’s “Fooled By Randomness“. Both books cite the work of Danny Kahneman. I blogged a bit about him here. I have been rummaging around the internet looking for whatever I can find on Danny and his work and have come up with some excellent content. But let me give you a taste of the sort of fascinating facts you’ll hear in Danny’s lectures first.
In a study Danny (I don’t know him personally but after listening to all these lectures, I feel as though I do. He could no doubt name the cognitive bias this suggests) mentions in one of his talks, people are asked how much pleasure they derive from their car. They are then asked enough questions about the car to determine its blue book (resale) value. It turns out that there IS a correlation between the amount of pleasure the subject reported and the dollar value of the car. i.e. Yes, that late model BMW in the garage DOES give you more pleasure than my 20 year old Honda would. BUT! They then go on to ask the subject if they find their commute to work pleasurable, and guess what?– nobody does!. It turns out that the ONLY time people derive pleasure from their car is when they are THINKING about it.
From Wikipedia:
With Amos Tversky (Kahneman’s longtime research partner, with whom he would have shared the Nobel prize had Tversky not died in 1996) and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982), and developed Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in Prospect theory.
Major Contributions:
Media – Most of these lectures have a fairly long-winded intro. Skip ahead if you don’t need the background info.
Explorations of the Mind – Well-Being: Living and Thinking About It. (YouTube)
Conversation With History – Intuition and Rationality. (YouTube)
Conversation With History – Intuition and Rationality. (Audio)
Explorations of the Mind – Intuition: The Marvels and the Flaws. (YouTube)
Nobel Prize Lecture. (YouTube)
Update March 2009- Kahneman and Taleb on the same stage discus the crash. (YouTube)
Update March 2010. From the February 2010, Ted Talk Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory. (YouTube)
Found a few more DK links.
A Perspective on Judgment and Choice 24pg. PDF doc. on the subject of his Nobel Prize.
The Allais Paradox Wired magazine 10/10 (Archive)
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