The density of non-replicable results varies by chapter.

You can ignore anything said in chapter 4 about priming for example.

See https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... for more.

A fun question especially considering the topic of the thread: are propositions that lack proof necessarily false?

No, but propositions with strong counter-evidence generally are, which is the main topic here. "Not-repicable" generally means "attempted to replicate, but got results inconsistent with the original conclusion."

That is not my understanding of what “not replicable” means. My understanding is “attempted to replicate, but didn’t get any significant results supporting the original conclusion”. There’s nothing that says that the new results are inconsistent with the original findings, only that they couldn’t find any support for them in a similar study.

And that could be for a number of reasons. Of course, sometimes the results are just wrong, due to statistical flukes, or too creative data cleaning and analysis. Often the results might just be much more limited than what the original study claims: Maybe the results of a psychological study is valid for MIT students in the beginning of the semester, before lunch, but not for Yale students in the early afternoon. In this case the only mistake would have been to assume the results were universal.

This is much more correct.

It is amazing how many smart people have bad intuition on science, misunderstand the null hypothesis, etc. So much for the viability of a scientific thinking populace afaict: it seems not possible to pull off.

A very good point (I'm not sure if it's relevant to the book in question, as I haven't read it or if you're referring just about the conversation so far). It seems like many people will take a strong claim they are dubious about, and on finding the evidence is sparse, inconclusive, or missing, swing to assuming that statement is false, instead of a more neutral position of "I have no opinion or some reason to think is unlikely, but others think it is unlikely even if poorly supported or unsupported."

This tendency seems to be capitalized on fairly heavily in political media by finding some poorly supported assertion of the other side to criticize, which causes people to assume the opposite is true.

Of course not, but the more important and difficult questions address how we should reason about, evaluate, and present ideas that lack proof.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or, in less dramatic terms, if you cannot reject the null, you should operate on the assumption that the null holds.

If evidence exists (failed studies) of lack of causality, is it a proof that no causality exists?

I suspect I may not be the first person to entertain this question, perhaps there is some literature on the matter.

> ...are propositions that lack proof necessarily false?

I'll have you know you just nearly nerd sniped a mathematician ;-)

Not necessarily false.

But such a small fraction of possible propositions are true that it is unlikely to be worthwhile to waste much time on propositions with no evidence.

Does this particular proposition have no evidence (none is in existence)?

is there a 'thinking fast and slow: the reproducible bits' recut? I know with films there's fan made edits.

We need O'Reilly: The Good Parts for books...

What's wild to me is that anyone could read chapter 4 and not look up the original papers in disbelief.

Long before the controversy was public I was reading that book and, despite claims that the reader must believe the findings, it sounded like nonsense to me. So I looked up the original paper to see what the experiment set up was, and it was unquestionably a ridiculous conclusion to draw from a deeply flawed experiment.

I still never understood how that chapter got through without anyone else having the same reaction I did.

I had exactly this reaction to Malcolm gladwell. It is completely obvious that gladwell across multiple books has never once read one of his references and consistently misrepresents what they say.

I have a slightly different take on him, which comes to the same ultimate end on how I view his work.

As he's shifted from primarily a journalist to primarily a storyteller, he's chosen to sacrifice additional information and accuracy in lieu of telling a consistent and compelling narrative that support what he thinks is the important thing to take away, not necessarily what you would take away were you to review all the same information yourself.

Under that understanding, I find him fun to listen to. The things he "reports" on/illuminates are interesting, but at this point I don't assume he's giving them an even handed representation, so his conclusions are not necessarily my own, and at best it's a set of things to look into and research myself if I find my interest piqued after a fun or interesting story is told.

But once you fact-check him a few times, then you won't be able to trust that his sources support his points anymore, which then raises the question: Is there ANY evidence that supports what Gladwell is trying to say?

If the best evidence that Gladwell could find to support his points, don't support his points, then it really makes me question the utility of trying to find evidence to support Gladwell's points.

It may be that, the reason why no subject matter expert makes the points that Gladwell does is because Gladwell's points are either wrong or not even wrong.

The problem is that Gladwell comes off as trying to be scientific, when really he's just a persuasive storyteller. If you view Gladwell as a purveyor of facts or a science communicator, then he does a horrible job and yes, it's hard to trust whatever he presents because he's at best not very careful about his facts and conclusions. In that case, why would you ever pay attention to him?

On the other hand if you see Gladwell for what I think he is, which is an entertaining storyteller using science as a backdrop to present his view of the world, and willing to twist it to suit his view, then he's really no different than many other writers. In that case you can enjoy him or not, at your leisure, just as you would any other editorial or op-ed piece. Entertainment is entertainment, and his content is entertaining even if I don't expect it to be true (to be clear, I'm approaching this as someone that mostly consumes his podcasts, which some chapters of his books have been directly converted to. I wouldn't want to spend the time reading this content that's not true, but I'm happy to listen to it while on a drive).

Whether he's causing more harm than good overall to the public is another question, but honestly that's a much bigger discussion with a lot of much bigger problems than him, so I'm not sure it's worth getting worked up over.

The problem with "take it or leave it, it's just a story" is that stories are not neutral, or cost-free. Memes compete for attention/proliferation/survival, and false-but-appealing memes outcompete true-but-boring memes. It's a mini DDOS attack on our collective bandwidth to be churning out durable falsehoods disguised as scientific insight.

Thank you for this comment - you have succinctly captured something that I have been feeling but unable to express in words.

Stories/memes/narratives are the most easy/potent form of mental ingestion - so much so that I think humans cannot ingest facts or ideas at all, only stories. And this puts a collective responsibility on all of us to be very careful about the stories we create.

Not just that, but real policy comes out of these books. Gladwell is highly influential among leaders of our bureaucracies. So when it comes time to look at airline safety policies, Gladwell's nonsense about Koreans being too hierarchical to fly safely can worm its way in there.

In those times, that was exactly the kind of thing that people wanted to believe

Haha, yeah, I am reading the book these days, and I clearly remember thinking that those effects seemed really exaggerated.

This is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and Slow taking into account the current state of research. Oh, and do it in the voice, style and structure of Tim Urban complete with crappy stick figure drawings."

Then we just need the LLM that will rewrite your book taking into account the current state of LLM hallucination behaviour.

Same! Just earlier today I was wanting to do this with "The Moral Animal" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

It's probably the AI thing I'm most excited about, and I suspect we're not far from that, although I'm betting the copyright battles are the primary obstacle to such a future at this point.

The thing with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it make it essentially all about geographic determinism. There's another book (Why the West Rules--For Now written before China had really fully emerged on the stage) which argues that, yes, geography played an important role in which cores emerged earliest. BUT if you look at the sweep of history, the eastern core was arguably more advanced than the western core at various times. So a head start can't be the only answer.

The book specifically considers Eurasia to be one geographical region and it does acknowledge the technological developments in China. The fact that Europe became the winner in this race, according to GGS, is a sign that while geography is important it does not determine the course of history. It is not all about geographic determinism

It is a snapshot in time, and so wrong if viewed in a longer context.

People from Europe, came to have the Industrial Revolution at just the correct moment.

Some small changes in history and it would have happened in India.

It is making a theory to fit the facts.

I do not think the author is a "white supremacist" but the book reads like that. Taking all the accidents of history and making them seem like destiny that Europeans rule the world (they do not, they never did, and they are fading from world domination fast)

I enjoyed both GGS and WTWRFN, but in a mode where I basically ignored the thesis, reading instead for the factual information so clearly presented. Like the coverage of the Polynesian diaspora in GGS that has really stuck with me.

Thinking Fast & Slow was a fun read, but I did not retain much more than the basic System I/II concept which I find is a useful device.

I thought the OP was joking!

I would actually like to have books that had "Thinking Fast and Slow" as a prerequisite. Many data visualization books could be summed up as a bar chart is easily consumed by System 1. The visual noise creates mental strain on System 2.

"please finish game of thrones treating the impending zombie invasion as an allegory for global warming"

Also please omit "who has a better story than bran"

Didn't George say it is such an allegory?

Awesome prompt!

Not me, if I'm going to take the time to read something, I want it to have been written, reviewed and edited by a human. There is far too much high fidelity information to assimilate that I'm missing out on to put in low fidelity stuff

Then don't copy and paste your copy of Thinking Fast and Slow into your AI along with my prompt then?

(My comment was less about my behavior but an attempt to encourage others to evaluate my thinking in hopes that they may apply it to their own in order to benefit our collective understanding)

Most human authors are frankly far too stupid to be worth reading, even if they do put care into their work.

This, IMO, is the actual biggest problem with LLMs training on whatever the biggest text corpus us that's available: they don't account for the fact that not all text is equally worthy of next-token-predicting. This problem is completely solvable, almost trivially so, but I haven't seen anyone publicly describe a (scaled, in production) solution yet.

It hardly matters what sources you are using if you filter it through something that has less understanding than a two year old, if any, no matter how eloquent it can express itself.

> This problem is completely solvable, almost trivially so, but I haven't seen anyone publicly describe a (scaled, in production) solution yet.

Can you explain your solution?

I imagine it looks something like "Censor all writing that contradicts my worldview"

It's not even clear that the dual process system 1/system 2 metaphor is accurate at all, so it may not be possible to redeem a book whose thesis is that the dual process model is correct.

It's not just that individual studies have failed to replicate. The whole field was in question at least a decade before the book was written, and since then many of the foundational results have failed to replicate. The book was in a sense the last hurrah of a theory that was on its way out, and the replication crisis administered the coup de grace IMO.

>This is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and Slow taking into account the...

I want something similar but for children's literature. From Ralph and the Motorcycle to Peter Pan, a lot of stuff doesn't hold up.

The books provide plenty of utility. But many things don't hold up to modern thinking. LLMs provide the opportunity to embrace classic content while throwing off the need to improvise as one parses outmoded ideas.

It will not be anything lice classic content anymore.

You could not redact piece of art out of "old ideas". It is like re-drawing classics paintings but mask nipples and removing blood.

And books which could be redacted this way without falling apart — well, don't read such books at all and don't feed them to the children.

Literature for children must not be dumbed down, but exactly as for adults, but better.

Maybe use chatGPT to make this make sense.

It isn't redaction but reasonable and artful substitution. It isn't about dumbing down, but removing dumb ideas.

Isn't that because the replications only looked at a selected subset of all the possible literature? You can be almost sure that if an article's conclusion hinges on a wide interpretation of the experimental result, or the stimuli haven't been sampled properly (and who knows the distribution of stimuli?) or the subjects are first year psych students, and the proof is a rejection of the null hypothesis, that it cannot be replicated. The worst offenders are those that conclude their theory is true because the theory they argue against is rejected.

That isn't what that blog post is saying.

It's saying that the author's invented metric may indicate that the studies within each chapter may not replicate. No actual replication studies were done to produce the table in that post.

My comment about priming is due to articles like https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-.... As https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-... shows, Daniel Kahneman came to agree that priming research was bunk.

I included that blog post as a guide to what other results may be suspect.

For what it's worth, Kahnman answered a post that scrutinized the effect of priming: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

Thanks for sharing this -- I read the book maybe a decade ago and largely discounted it as non-replicable pop-sci; this changed my opinion of Kahneman's perspective and rigor (for the better!)

It looks like it's a bit more nuanced than that. What I saw from the link was some debate about what holds and what doesn't for various forms of "priming"

Yeah I wouldn't read too much into any single study. But what I would defend vigorously is System1 / System2 distinction as something so clear/fundamental that you can see it constantly once you understand it.

It’s also very common in psychology theories, I haven’t read “Thinking, fast and slow” but I imagine there’s more than Kahneman’s own papers cited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory

wow, it looks like "dual process" theory is basically the same thing.

I don't know if there's a better text on dual-process theory out there (perhaps by the original authors), but regardless of who originated it, I think it's something worth learning about for everyone (and if you don't have a better source then Thinking Fast and Slow is a very good one).

That's not him though.

Like, it was in all my cog psych textbooks more than twenty years ago, with cites back in the 80s (which weren't him).

This is my favourite paper of theirs: http://stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/TverskyKahneman197...

I got into a bunch of trouble with some reviewers of my thesis for referencing this repeatedly.

It's just such a bad name though.

In software we often call it fastpath and slowpath :)

It's been called "emotion / intuition" and "logic" for centuries or millennia before the goofy System name was invented.

Ironically people like System 1/2 more than intuition/logic because the terms sound more like they are coined by System 2.

Maybe some people do. I have to keep checking which one is system 1 and which is system 2 every time I hear the terms, because they're not self-evident. Intuition/logic is.

At least, they sound that way to your System 1!

... except the distinction was being made in various forms long before Kahneman, and does get questioned. When you start to poke at it, what's intuitive starts to seem less so.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916124606...

(that's a link to a defense of dual process theories, but it makes clear there's increasing criticism of them)

Does anyone have a link to a publicly accessible version of this paper?

I think this should work:

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/dua...

There's review paper coming from a more critical perspective in Psych Bulletin or Psych Review I was looking for, but I couldn't find it atm.

I wonder if it's better to have a lot of small hits or a few big hits and many misses in regard to replication. If the studies which have the greatest implications replicate, then maybe many misses is not that bad.

That's an interesting theoretical question.

Unfortunately the reality is that the more interesting and quotable the result is, the less likely it is to replicate. So replication problems most strongly hit things that seem like they should have the greatest implications.

Kind of a "worst of all worlds" scenario.

And critically, scientific publications are incentivized likewise to publish the most outlandish claims they can possibly get away with. That same incentive affects individual scientists, who disproportionately submit the most outlandish claims they can possibly get away with. The boring stuff -- true or not -- is not worth the hassle of putting into a publishable article.

And then the most outlandish of these are picked up by popular science writers. Who proceed to mangle it beyond recognition, and add a random spin. This then goes to the general public.

Some believe the resulting garbage. And wind up with weird ideas.

Others use that garbage to justify throwing out everything that scientists say. And then double down on random conspiracy theories, denialism, and pseudoscience.

I wish there was a solution to this. But everyone is actually following their incentives here. :-(

The scientists push it on the pop writers, to created a Personal Brand and an industrial complex around their pet theory.

The general idea is very simple. Tactical vs strategic thinking are two different things and it’s good to be aware of that. I don’t know that that needs to be proven or disproven

19th Century definition of tactics aas being everything that happens within the range of cannons and strategy as everything that happens outside of cannon range, fits well to thinking fast (tactics) and slow (strategy).

> It’s worth noting that many of the results in Thinking, Fast and Slow didn’t hold up to replication.

Irony is, Kahneman had himself written a paper warning about generalizing from studies with small sample sizes:

"Suppose you have run an experiment on 20 subjects, and have obtained a significant re- sult which confirms your theory (z = 2.23, p < .05, two-tailed). You now have cause to run an additional group of 10 subjects. What do you think the probability is that the results will be significant, by a one-tailed test, separately for this group?"

"Apparently, most psychologists have an exaggerated belief in the likelihood of successfully replicating an obtained finding. The sources of such beliefs, and their consequences for the conduct of scientific inquiry, are what this paper is about."

Then 40 years later, he fell into the same trap. He became one of the "most psychologists".

http://stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/TverskyKahneman197...

psychology isn’t science. it’s a grave mistake to read/interpret it a such. does that mean it’s useless? of course not: some of the findings (and i use findings very loosely) help us adjust our prior probabilities. if we’re right in the end, we were lucky. otherwise we just weren’t.

I think psychology is very successful at categorizing abd treating mental illnesses. The DSM is really a monument and hold for most of its part very well to scrutiny.

Where psychology is massively failing to replicate is in trying to characterise healthy individuals. Typically the work of Kahneman.

But that's what interest people and sells, pop psychology.

Genuinely curious, how would you scrutinize a categorization tool that includes both causes and effects in its key?

I'm only tangentially following the whole autism/Asperger's/ADD/ADHD development, and I'm growing more and more convinced that all these categories are mostly arbitrary constructs grown out of random history and academia politics. Happy to be proved wrong here, though.

I haven't read this to be fair but this seems to question the dsm itself. https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/psychia...

That's an unexpected position for me.

How do you define science? Could it be a science, according to you, or is there something fundamentally non-scientific about it?

it’s fundamentally unscientific at this point. much of our current science lies in the realm of natural law. so far we haven’t found any laws that govern human behavior. what we know, with considerable certainty, is that behavior can be positively influenced. but at the point of action, nothing we know of compels any specific/predictable behavior. until we have found rigid laws of reasons that apply to both the brute and the civilized, any ‘discoveries’ of psychology are reports of someone’s idiosyncrasies, imho.

Is it not scientific to say that X property is true of human behavior more often that it is not with statistical significance?

There's nothing about the scientific method that requires the process to output tidy little laws to be deserving of being called science.

Some fields are quite lucky that the universe is so elegantly organized, but for that isn't true for the overwhelming majority of fields with as many degrees of freedom as biological systems and anything more complex.

That doesn't mean we can't conduct experiments that reproduce.

> How do you define science?

Science is that which could be disproved.

It is a very small, and very important, part of human knowledge.

The history of science generally doesn't seem to be characterized by shifts in theory due to empirical disproofs. Usually, when theories are "disproved", we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but rather, we want to stick to the theory and try to patch it up. When Uranus didn't seem to be moving according to the predictions of Newtonian mechanics (a disproof!), physicists didn't throw out Newton, they posited the existence of another planet. And they turned out to be right, Neptune existed.

See Chalmers' What is This Thing Called Science? for an introduction to these kinds of topics, or Kuhn and Feyerabend's work for historical responses. (And the Duhem-Quine thesis for the "auxiliary hypothesis" response to falsifiability I hinted at with my example.)

His own work held up very well to replication. It's when he is citing the work of other scholars (in particular, that of social psychologists) that doesn't hold up well to replication.

“When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief . . . The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”

This game is doubly valuable when the surprising result confirms one of your existing beliefs. I'm pretty good about doing this for surprising results that contradict a belief I hold, but I have to be extra disciplined about doing it when it confirms one of my beliefs.

> calibrate yourself on the replication crisis

I imagine that in 30 years, it will become clear that individual humans display enormous diversity, their diversity increasing as societal norms relax, and their behavior changing as the culture around them change. As such, replication is hopeless and trying to turn "psychology" into a science was a futile endeavor.

That is not to say that psychology cannot be helpful, just that we cannot infer rational conclusions or predictions from it the same way we can from hard sciences.

Self help books are enormously helpful, but they're definitely not science either.

you have no idea what "psychology" is, do you?

I have a similar point of view as acchow, so it's possible I don't understand psychology either. Could you enlighten us about what it actually is?

it is a positivistic science, i.e. it studies observable phenomena using the scientific method. The days of Freud and Jung where you could just smoke cigars and fart out ideas about collective unconsciousness and anal fixation are long over. Experiments are conducted, confounding variables controlled, and hypotheses (including H0) are tested. Granted, it's not as easy as in physics where you just drop a ball repeatedly and note down the results, buf it doesn't in any way make it a "softer" science. To equate psychology with self-help books is akin to equating LLMs with Markov chains.

Experiments involving grad students dont correlate well with how (normal) people behave in real life.

I imagine this is just as fun to play with unsurprising results.

> It’s worth noting that many of the results in Thinking, Fast and Slow didn’t hold up to replication.

Beyond this specific issue, are psychology experiments and issues time and culture sensitive? I think so [1]

[1] https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/42104...

“Many” is hyperbole, “Some” is more fair and his results stood up or the replication crisis better than most of his contemporaries.

This is unfortunately the case for many books on human behavior. Sure, Dan Ariely comes to mind, but the field itself is very tricky.

I don't think we - people used to STEM - appreciate how difficult behavioral psychology is. In STEM, we are used to isolating experiments down, so there are as few variables as possible. And we are used to well-designed experiments being reproducible if everyone does what they are supposed to do right.

In the study of human behavior there are always countless uncontrollable variables, every human is a bit different and it is very difficult to discover something that would apply generally. Also, pretty much all of the research is done on western population of European descent.

This is why I take all behavioral claims with a large grain of salt, but I still have respect for the researchers doing their best in the field.

I don't agree, I think if you understand science in general then you realize at an early age e.g. 20 that social/behavioral science is at best a pseudoscience

Attacking me is a poor way to phrase your fringe opinion.

I disagreed with your opinion, I didn't attack you. I don't know the first thing about you.

It's so weird that the stuff about priming was supposedly debunked, yet if you look around at what happened to society over the past few years, I've been blown away by how suggestible and controllable people are.

I believe same was the case for "Growth mindset"

> many of the results

My impression is that the priming chapter is bunk, but the rest has generally held up. Is that no longer true?