Commenter above means "Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment" by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, first published on May 18, 2021.
Writing & style commentary: "next" as used in the comment above will confuse many who don't already know about the book, as in time-related usage "next" typically connotes the future (implying i.e. "the book hasn't been released yet"). Alternative words to "next" with less ambiguity include "later", "subsequent", or "follow-up".
Not sure why I bothered responding to a troll.
This is inaccurate. Here is what troll means to many people "a person who makes a deliberately offensive or provocative online post." My response clarified without being offensive.
To put in the terms of Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow: it is worth considering if maybe the commenter above got triggered first (a System 1 emotional reaction) and then later sought to rationalize (System 2) a "reason" for that: namely "he's a pedantic troll".
> If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality. - Daniel Kahneman
It's much easier to point out others' alleged irrational thinking, but the main purpose of books like this is to help you better understand your own thinking.
That sounds right. I only can make probabilistic guesses as to what is happening in someone else's brain. By posing a question to someone else, there is some chance that person may ask it of themselves. If not today, then perhaps in future.
You are claiming this resolves written ambiguity in comments? I hope not.
Also: I hope you recognize that the "next" link doesn't appear until a comment has a reply. So think about what someone sees when they are writing a comment; namely, there is no "next" link visible. This undermines your implied argument, which seems to be "the word 'next' is visible in the headers, which will make the use of 'next' in the comment itself unambiguous".
Forgive me for saying so, but what a silly argument -- on either level. You are clearly upset and bothered and resorting to rationalization and attacks.
Also, please stop crossing into name-calling and personal attack, as you did here. jeffwass shouldn't have referred to you as "a troll" but there's no question that your posts have been having trollish effects in the threads, and this is actually what matters (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Here are another couple of recent examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522090, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522043. We need you to stop posting like this.
> Also, please stop crossing into name-calling and personal attack, as you did here.
I see many of my comments were unkind and unnecessary. I'm sorry, and I will stop. Here are three examples in this thread of where I went wrong, in my own words:
- I was accusatory, mean, and condescending when I wrote "I wonder if you will be intellectually honest if/when I reveal errors, mistakes, oversimplifications, and so on?"
- I did some psychoanalysis (which is unwarranted), such as when I wrote "You are clearly upset and bothered and resorting to rationalization and attacks."
- I accused someone of bad faith when I wrote: "You exaggerated and trivialized. You deflected and moved the goalposts. These are signs you want to win more than discuss in good faith."
I will keep these course corrections in mind.
P.S. I know this isn't a full reply to your comment; I am still processing some parts.
Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice.
“The next book he wrote, Noise, ….” Would have been better or “After that book he wrote Noise….”.
I absolutely was confused for a second or two and thought “wait, are we talking about a different person? He isn’t going to have a ‘next’ book unless he had one queued up?”.
Did I need the explanation above? Not really, I’d come to the right conclusion on my own but I can imagine someone who isn’t a native speaker (reader?) might stumble on that more and I enjoyed the confirmation.
This is overconfidence; e.g. it "it is clear to me, so it must have been clear to everyone else."
Indeed, there is a person in this overall thread [1] saying the use of "next" was ambiguous:
> I literally thought some unpublished book.
It was made clear to everyone because of the word choice in context. If someone didn't get it then they didn't put two and two together.
I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries and the top entry aligns more with "subsequent" in every one.
You are wrong on this.
First, I hope you recognize there are other entries other than the first. Multiple entries means there are multiple usages. There can be ambiguity.
In the case of the Apple Dictionary, here is the first:
> 1 (of a time or season) coming immediately after the time of writing or speaking: we'll go next year | next week's parade.
> I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries and the top entry aligns more with "subsequent" in every one.
Wow. You are claiming this resolves ambiguity in general?
You are not the arbiter of what is ambiguous for others. I suggest you should be curious about what makes this ambiguous or confusing rather than post-hoc defining some standard by which things are not ambigous.
>> there is a person in this overall thread ... saying the use of "next" was ambiguous
> Ok, fine, probably someone will get confused about anything.
You exaggerated and trivialized. You deflected and moved the goalposts. These are signs you want to win more than discuss in good faith.
Here's one way to commit the fallacy: when someone points out a communication issue, mock them for being "too literal" or "pedantic" rather than acknowledging the ambiguity existed.
Thanks for the feedback.
To focus on "should" for a second. If I would not have written my second paragraph, I would not have made my main point: I'm trying to get people to pay attention to ambiguity more broadly and tamp down this all-too-common tendency for people to think "the way I see things is obvious and/or definitive" which pervades Hacker News like a plague. Perhaps working with computers too much has damaged our cognitive machinery: human brains are not homogeneous nor deterministic parsers of meaning.
Perhaps the second paragraph got some people thinking a little bit. We are discussing Kahnemann's life's work after all. This is a perfect place to discuss our flawed intellectual machinery and our biases. Kahnemann would be happy if people here improved their self-understanding and communication with each other.
You are an excellent poster child for this tendency in this thread.
So beside pedantic it’s unnecessary.
- product development: why make someone "do one extra click" when you can make the extra click unnecessary?
- writing: respect your audience's time.
- humility: take one minute of your time to save other's time.
- databases: optimize for reading not writing
The ones who don’t care about the book don‘t click anyway.
The ones who are interested click no matter if it’s an upcoming or already existing book.
1. The argument above is sound, but it overstretches my metaphor and sidesteps my point which is: "if there is negligible cost in helping a customer, do it." Stated another way: "if reducing ambiguity helps a customer and has negligible cost, do it." (If a one word change reduces some ambiguity for some people, that's an easy win. Copy-editors do this frequently.)
2. Another angle: broadly speaking, I'm asking the question "What is better?" not just "What is necessary?". The first motivates improvement, no matter where you are. While the latter can sometimes be pragmatic, too often aiming only for 'necessity' justifies the status quo.
> The irony is that people who insist something is "obvious" are often demonstrating a lack of awareness about how communication actually works. Clear communicators tend to be more empathetic about ambiguity precisely because they understand how easily misunderstandings occur. [1]
> “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” [2]
[1] Claude Sonnet 4.5 in response to """Some people that think "X is so obvious" that they will frown upon people who think "X is not obvious"."""
[2] Steven Pinker, author of The Sense of Style
You started and perpetuated a completely unnecessary flamewar here, and of all the offtopic things to do that about, someone's use of the word "next" is particularly superfluous.
An isolated comment of that sort is forgivable, but perpetuating the flamewar and crossing into personal attack, as you did below, is not. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that.