Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Daniel Kahneman treats regression to the mean as a form of explanation. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow , pp. 178-183.) He also says that when we see regression to the mean, what we are seeing has "does not have a causal explanation" (p. 178). I say both these contentions are nonsense. (Once again, let me put in my usual caveat: I greatly admire Kahneman's work as an experimental psychologist . But here he is doing philosophy of science: he has left his area of expertise and is forwarding ideas which [I contend] he cannot defend,  and which certainly cannot be decided by any experiment. And I will also note that citing regression to the mean is fine as a way of justifying a prediction .) Why is regression to the mean not an explanation of any empirical fact? Because it is a tautology, and tautologies never explain empirical phenomena. In particular, in this case, regression to the mean always holds, because something won't be the mean unless it is regressed to . Let...

Kahneman and Tversky famously posited that there is a " conjunction fallacy ": people often assign a higher probability to a "plausible" case with more specific conditions than a general one. That clearly is erroneous. David Gordon tries to deny  Kahneman and Tversky have exposed any error in people's reasoning. He writes: "I do not think this result demonstrates that the people in the survey have reasoned wrongly. Suppose, when asked about the probability of Linda's occupation, people think it very unlikely that she has chosen to be a bank teller. They think, by contrast, that she very likely identifies with feminism. When asked about Linda's being both a feminist and bank teller, they may not recall their earlier estimate of her being a teller. Rather, they may simply lower their estimate that she is a feminist, to reflect the new information that she is also a teller." The reason Gordon tries to debunk Kahneman and Tversky is clear: a...

Here I noted that using Jovan Belcher's recent crimes as a soapbox to call for tighter gun control is a logically specious form of argumentation: a single, spectacular case does not significantly change the case for or against gun control at all; instead, the person using it is relying on the availability bias described by Daniel Kahneman. But this bias distorts policy in terrible ways. I recall once when a man was beheaded by an elevator that someone in the legislature immediately called for laws ensuring "this will never happen again." Of course, it had never happened before, and, as I recall Joe Bob Briggs noting at the time, legislation or no, it was never going to happen again anyway. A one in a trillion chance concatenation of events had taken place, and it was an utter waste of time and resources to devote any attention to it. But, the case sure was spectacular, and I bet the proposed "fix" got the lawmaker some TV facetime. Frankly, I have paid littl...

Claim one : The idea of a "hot hand" is useless for predicting basketball players' next shot. There is no point in feeding the ball to a player who is "hot," because the fact he is "hot" (if that really has any meaning) has no predictive value as to how his next shot will fair. Tversky et al. have won here! I acknowledge this is true, as I have every time I have written on the topic. Claim two : The notion that players are sometimes "in the zone" is merely a statistical illusion. If you are a player and think you are "hot," you are merely being deluded by your faulty understanding of statistics. As opposed to claim one, people making claim two want to deny that the subjective experience of being "on" has any validity at all. This claim is definitely floating around out there. I post this as Steve Landsburg writes me: "Here's a much simpler model [than yours, Callahan]: "Half the time, players hav...

I thought it might be useful to create in a simple, model situation in which hot hands do indeed exist but which yields results totally consist with the finding of Tversky, Gilovich, and Vallone on the phenomenon . Let us assume there is a player, Smith, who has genuine hot streaks when she is "in the zone."* She is ordinarily a 50% shooter, but during those times, she shoots 70%. However, how long she will stay in the zone is random, and on every new shot she has a 50% chance of "losing" the hot hand. At the moment she loses the flow, since she loses through some sort of disruption in her concentration,** she only has a 30% chance of making her next shot. It should be obvious that even when Smith genuinely has a hot hand at time x, for any shot at x + 1 there is a 50% chance the shot will go in, which is exactly her normal shooting average. Applying the method and the criterion of Tversky et al. to Smith would yield their conclusion, "the hot hand is an i...

I'm beginning to detect a pattern of the sort Kahneman likes to find, in his errors. Kahneman talks about times when someone is asked a hard question ("Will Obama win re-election in 2012?" asked in 2011) but substitutes an easier question without realizing it ("What are Obama's poll numbers today?"). Kahneman suffers from the reverse cognitive problem: he asks (or sees someone asking) a narrow question, but when the answer is found, he thinks it is the answer to a broader question. Thus, Kahneman finds the answer to the narrow question , "Do people see patterns in things that aren't really there?" which is "yes," but he thinks he has found the answer to the much broader question, "Is the word more or less orderly than we suspect it is?" Similarly, Kahneman's colleague, Amos Tversky, and two co-authors ask the question, "Does a player having made a series of shots in a row in basketball imply a higher likelihoo...

I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow . It is a very interesting book. When Kahneman is on his own ground, psychology, he seems to be a brilliant thinker. (Not being a psychologist, I feel the need to hedge this with a "seems to be": I'm really not qualified to judge!) I think he probably deserved the Nobel Prize he received. But as soon as Kahneman starts talking philosophy, he begins to make terrible errors: we might say he is suffering from the "illusion of understanding." Let us examine a few of these, starting with consistency and coherence . Kahneman litters his text with statement such as "we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see," or we "produce a representation of reality that makes too much sense." This is because "we are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world." At first glance, it might seem that this is just a psychological truth, something Kahneman ha...