
Daniel Kahneman on when to trust intuitive judgment - yarapavan
https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/11/16/daniel-kahneman-do-not-trust-your-intuition-even-f/?slreturn=20181030094020
======
mrxd
Maybe it's just me, but I find Kahneman frustrating to read and this article
really demonstrates the problem: he defines a concept and then gives examples
which don't meet the definition.

He defines intuition as thinking you know without knowing how you know. OK,
great. Now the example: guessing someone's GPA based on the fact that they
started reading early. Like most people, I guessed it would be on the high
side. Kahneman calls this "intuition that is generated automatically with high
confidence." And that's… just wrong.

I have very little confidence in my guess, and it certainly isn't generated
automatically. It's based on a belief—which turns out to be wrong—that early
reading has some relationship with college GPA.

So maybe in this example, he is using the dictionary definition of
"intuition", which is basically non-conscious reasoning. He thinks this shows
the problem with intuition, but again, that's just wrong.

I didn't get the answer wrong because I failed to reason consciously. It's
because my belief about the relationship between early reading and GPA was
wrong. If I take his advice and don't trust my intuition, and carefully and
logically reason my way to the answer, guess what? I'm still wrong because my
information is wrong.

His explanation of when to trust your intuition is similarly flawed. He
basically says you can trust your intuition when you have good information.
Well yeah. That's a generic statement that goes for almost any method of
drawing conclusions about the world, and doesn't help us understand when
intuition is useful or not useful.

~~~
Shank
I think at least some of it comes from the fact that Kahneman didn't write the
article. The article is composed from both his speech that was referenced and
from the book that he wrote, and kind of marries them together in a weird way.
I find articles like this extremely thin because they usually synthesize
points with very thin lines. Original authors will have hundreds of repeated
examples and data sets, of which Kahneman is one of them. He certainly didn't
win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for nothing -- he has serious data to
back up his research.

If I had to summarize Thinking, Fast & Slow up in one sentence: human
intuition shouldn't be trusted when it comes to statistics problems, because
humans aren't naturally statistical thinkers.

All of the research in the behavioral economics category shows this pattern
very well. GPA distribution among populations is statistically quantifiable.
Due to human cognitive biases, however, it appears to be a problem that has an
obvious answer by intuition, and that answer is wrong.

The specific three qualities that are outlined as giving way to intuition boil
down to having a large body of evidence and a very tight feedback loop, which
statistics does not have but things like emotion reading do have. If you get
the emotions of your significant other wrong you'll immediately see the
repercussions. Casually misjudging someone on the street because of statistics
will never see you being corrected.

But really, I think you should just read the book. This article doesn't even
come close to doing behavioral economics justice.

~~~
mrxd
I have read the book, and found it frustrating for the same reasons I
mentioned. For example, the core concept of System 1 vs System 2. He says
somewhere in the book early on that they aren't actually "systems", i.e. a
physical brain structure. But then he uses language like "System 1 does X and
System 2 does Y," implying there's some grounding in neuroscience, when there
is in fact none. They are just a grab bag of functions that don't have much in
common, but we're led to believe he's describing something fundamental about
the brain.

The other thing that annoys me is his pessimism and nihilism of seeing human
beings as fatally irrational. One response that I found interesting was the
book The Enigma of Reason by two evolutionary psychologists who argue that
reason evolved in humans specifically because we are social animals, and the
purpose of reason is to persuade others. It's why we are so much better at
catching other people's poor reasoning than our own. The implication is that
reason is designed for group settings. Showing that isolated individuals
reason badly is like riding a bike on an ice skating rink and saying the bike
sucks. We test human reasoning in conditions its not designed for and then
come away with an overly pessimistic view of humanity.

~~~
maroonblazer
I've not read "Thinking Fast and Slow" but long ago I read "Heuristics and
Biases"[0] and attended one of Kahneman's talks during his tour promoting his
newest book.

I couldn't help but think that TFaS was the product not so much of a desire to
share some new insights he'd recently discovered but rather that he saw (or
some publisher pointed out to him) how authors such as Pinker, Greene, Tyson,
et al were garnering considerable attention and revenue translating
sophisticated scientific topics developed by others for a lay audience. As if
someone said to him: "Hey, you were involved in discovering some sophisticated
and important topics, why don't _you_ translate those to a lay audience?!"

I have great respect for Kahneman and H&B is a wonderful collection. However I
find it peculiar that the entirety of TFaS seems, on the surface (again I've
not read it) strikingly similar to essay #22 in H&B by Steven A. Sloman titled
"Two Systems of Reasoning". In it he uses Kahneman's and Tversky's work to
argue for two competing strategies for arriving at the truth: associative vs
rule-based.

It's as if Kahneman is borrowing from Sloman who borrowed from Kahneman.

[0][https://www.amazon.com/Heuristics-Biases-Psychology-
Intuitiv...](https://www.amazon.com/Heuristics-Biases-Psychology-Intuitive-
Judgment/dp/0521796792)

~~~
rorykoehler
I found thinking fast and slow unreadable. Bored me too death.

------
lordnacho
This makes total sense. What's he's basically saying is if you've collected a
lot of evidence, you can quickly classify a new data point. (And if feedback
is not immediate or very noisy, you're not collecting as much evidence as you
think.)

If that sounds like a lesson for machine learning, it's because it is.

For the same reason, as a quantitative trader, I look at stuff that has a lot
of repetitions historically. And over short time periods, because that both
gives you faster feedback and more non-overlapping reps. Which addresses the
point he makes about the financial markets.

The other takeaway is that you don't have nearly as much evidence as you
think. I mean who wouldn't think that kids who learn to speak early have high
GPAs?

Often I get into a discussion with people who pull out something similar, with
no specific source. Everyone else is convinced that not only is the hypothesis
true, but that there's so much evidence that I'm just being difficult when I
ask for it.

There's a lot of traps like this in the social sciences. I'm not saying these
are all wrong, just that your intuition is seductive if you don't ask for the
evidence:

\- "People descended from the cold regions are smarter, because they had to be
smart to survive"

\- "CEOs who have share options perform better, because they have better
incentives"

\- "Without patents nobody would bother to invent anything"

\- "Reading to your kids is good for them"

Lastly, some things are unlearnable for one person. If you're going to learn,
you'd need to aggregate somehow:

\- How many times has someone sold their company? Probably not more than a
handful. Even people who have n>0 are quite rare. So what does this say about
how highly you should weight this person's experience?

\- How should I coach the team for the big final? Again, how many finals are
there in a year in any given sport? Can you learn any lesson at all that's
separate from just increasing the n of the number of games coached (which
probably is meaningful)?

~~~
dwighttk
"How should I coach the team for the big final?"

why is the "big final" any different from any other game?

~~~
bluGill
Because it is the last game. In any other game you need to pace your players
to ensure that they are rested enough by the next game to play well, but in
this game you can throw that all away as they will be rested. In the final
minutes having a player do something that will break their leg might win and
there is no downside to future games (there are of course ethical concerns).

~~~
dwighttk
just give everyone amphetamines, problem solved

(there are of course ethical concerns)

------
paulsutter
> in order to develop expert intuition (1) some regularity in the world that
> someone can pick up and learn (2) a lot of practice, and (3) you have to
> know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong

> “So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it
> [about each other]. People who pick stocks in the stock market do not have
> it. Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support
> developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained

~~~
myth_buster
This I believe is also hammered on in Thinking fast and slow which is an
excellent book.

It condenses the major findings on behavioral psychology from 21st century
into an accessible paperback.

~~~
beat
Adding this to my reading list, thanks!

------
MKais
Based on his three conditions, intuition looks like machine learning

~~~
mrfredward
Well, intuition is an output of a neural network, it's just that the neural
net is implemented in meat instead of silicon.

------
meditativeape
My intuition tells me that these three conditions are correct. Should I trust
it?

While these conditions intuitively make sense, the example that he used to
support his conclusions feels very weak. If the only information I know about
this person is she read fluently at a young age, I don't think I can make a
good guess of her GPA in college at all. There's no "right intuition" in this
case, because so many other variables are in play.

~~~
projectramo
I think what you are missing is "base rate neglect."

Let's say the overall average GPA is 3 (or 3.1 for women):

[https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-
school-g...](https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-school-gpa)

Then you would expect that to swamp the information that this person was an
early reader. You might let the early reader have a slight effect.

------
clay_the_ripper
I think it’s important to establish different kinds of intuition. Intuition =/
stastistics. While I like Khaneman and his books are interesting, his
arguments around intuition show a fundamental misunderstanding of intuition as
I understand it and apply it.

If you try to use intuition for things which are better suited to statistical
analysis, then yes he is correct. But what about all the other kinds of
intuion? The intuition of an author knowing how to put together a sentence. A
painter intuiting colors. A businessperson intuiting a good hire.

So many times in business, we have to rely on intuition because we simply do
not have the time or resources to make decisions mathematically.

For example, I work in an industry (marketing) that is increasingly dominated
by a school of thought of A/B testing.

The typical approach is create hundreds of combinations of different ads,
copy, and creative and then see which one converts the best. I take an
entirely different approach that I find much more successful and efficient
that relys almost completely on intuition.

I simply create the ad that I “know” will do the best and run that one. Of
course if it doesn’t work, I make changes, I look at data and results as part
of it, but the majority of the time I run my business on intuition. Could I
squeeze out a few percent here or there? Probably. But the time and money it
would cost to come up with statistically significant data-driven decisions is
far higher than having an ad up and running for an extra 2 weeks.

I created a campaign this week with one offer, one landing page, one version
of an ad. The landing page converts on day one at 77%. No testing. No looking
at data. Getting it right the first time is a culmination of all my
experience, all my knowledge. That’s what people pay me for. I could spend
weeks A/B testing data, but intuition of what allows me to run my business
successfully, and is the reason people hire me.

~~~
zwieback
So, what you're saying is that K's three conditions are met in your specific
case.

~~~
clay_the_ripper
Re-reading the article, yes you are correct. Although I still feel it’s
important to distinguish different types of intuion. The intuition he is
referring to here, and the 3 conditions, doesn’t apply well when we are
talking about my other examples, like a painter intuiting colors or an author
picking one word/sentence over another. There’s no immediate feedback on
those. With a book you have to make all the decisions, publish the book, and
then people either like it or not. In the case of art it seems to me, there is
a different kind of intuion at work. Ideas and creativity are subject to
intuiton, but not the kind that the author is taking about here.

~~~
munificent
_> doesn’t apply well when we are talking about my other examples, like a
painter intuiting colors or an author picking one word/sentence over another.
There’s no immediate feedback on those._

This is most definitely false. Painters constantly look at how the colors they
pick work in the larger composition. Very very few painters could produce
anything tolerable with the lights off.

Likewise, good authors are constantly re-reading and editing their own work.
It's a truism in writing that "first drafts are shit". The experience of
reading a sentence you read is very different from what you experienced while
selecting the words, and you do get immediate feedback when you do it.

~~~
clay_the_ripper
Right, I suppose I was thinking of the fact that a painting success or lack of
success is not an opinion of the artist, but rather the critical reception of
the work. I’m sure everyone who writes a book or does a painting (for the
purposes of public consumption anyway) thinks that on some level it is “good”.
But an artist creating a painting that is new or innovative is by definition
doing something someone has never done before. Good art must be both original
in some way AND “good” (subjectively). What drives an artist to create
something new, and combine elements in a novel way is a form of intuition, and
my argument is that form of intuition is as seperate from the type of intuion
the author is referring to.

Where do an artists ideas come from? No one knows, really. But forming them
into a concrete work is a type of intuition, which I think is quite different
from what the author is taking about. Hence, how you define “intuition” is
important. I believe there are several ways to interpret the concept, and it’s
important to distinguish between the types.

~~~
munificent
There are a couple levels to this.

1) How a painter learns to get the image onto the canvas that they have in
their mind. This requires a ton of intuition. You're literally using your hand
muscles, so it's not like you can get out pen and paper and calculate how many
Newtons of force to apply to the brush. This intuition very much lines up with
the three rules of the article.

2) How a painter learns how the audience will respond to their work. This
definitely has a slower feedback loop, since they have to complete a work and
show it to people. But otherwise, all three components are there. Almost every
successful artist has a long history of making work and showing them to
people. Art school is _all_ about critiquing each other's work to train
exactly this intuition.

------
branweb
I wonder how those three conditions apply to intuition in software
development. The only condition that seems to regularly be unmet is "immediate
feedback."

~~~
tunesmith
I think intuition goes downhill as your system increases in complexity. It's
harder to develop deep experience or regularity in distributed systems than it
is in your monolith that you know inside and out. Feedback can get less
immediate, too.

~~~
zwieback
So true. I spent the bulk of my early SW development career in distributed
systems that were complex enough that they felt like they had a mind of their
own. What I learned back then is that my intuition was worthless. Maybe that's
just me but the key to success was always to set aside your expectation of
what your code does and instead spend more time instrumenting and collecting
data on what was actually going on. This is especially true for completely
asynchronous systems like networks or systems that integrate multiple
independent subsystems. Things just don't happen in the order you expected
when timeouts, aborted operations and retries bubble up and down your OS and
application stack.

After 30 years I consider myself pretty capable in debugging such systems but
one thing I never use is "intuition" as defined in the beginning of the
article.

------
placebo
Those are very reasonable points to explain the way correct subconscious
prediction of success works. I wonder though whether this definition doesn't
run the risk of creating a closed system of thought, i.e one where you can
always refute opposing evidence from within the system without being aware
that the system is making you incapable of seeing something else.
Specifically, any genuine cases of intuition not due to Kahneman's reasoning
(if such exist), would never be seen and always attributed to survivor bias
(as long as they don't become a statistical anomaly).

It's probably difficult to build a case against this reasoning, as it seems
quite logical - my first thought as a candidate for a counterexample was
claims of "love at first sight". Sure, many of those might end in divorce but
does that mean that all the successes are just due to being on the right side
of statistics or is there something more going on?

------
blahblah3
The third criteria of immediate feedback seems too stringent. In chess,
feedback is often not immediate. If one were to run a reinforcement learning
algorithm on chess with no human coded rewards, the only objective feedback
would come at the end of the game (win, loss, draw).

Certainly the more immediate the feedback the better though.

~~~
Benjammer
I think it's more important that the input produces an immediate and readily
observable change to the state of the world, not necessarily that you must
have perfect information in the feedback as well that shows the exact utility
of your previous action.

For example, in the stock market it's not even clear to me what the total
scope of effects is, immediate or not, that any single action I take as a
private investor will have on the market. Before I even can start to learn
about the effectiveness of the changes that my actions produce, I am hamstrung
by an inability to see an immediate, comprehensive effect to each action.

------
mattnewton
I can’t figure out how to actually read the article. There is a button to
continue that does nothing when I tap it.

------
pilooch
Sounds much like conditions to a successful solving of a problem when modeled
with machine learning. Have enough data, immediate (as opposed to delayed)
feedback, and enough structure in the data. That neural networks in our brains
might be learning an embedding or two :)

------
beat
This reminds me of one of my little sayings... "Common sense is just a first
approximation of reality". So yeah, common sense is more likely right than
not, but it is not reliable. If you need a reliable answer, you need to go
deeper than common sense.

Of course, intuition is somewhat different, in that intuition can be wrong
more often than right. See Hans Rosling's findings in _Factfulness_ to grok
that, and start to understand just how dumb you actually are.

------
the_cat_kittles
those three conditions are needed to learn _anything_.

------
Benjammer
Elizer Yudkowski extrapolates quite a bit on these ideas in his book
Inadequate Equilibria[0].

[0][https://equilibriabook.com/toc/](https://equilibriabook.com/toc/)

------
gesman
[http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading-
stock...](http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading-stock-
options-markets/)

------
tw1010
What does regularity mean, more formally? The phenomenon needs to have a
probability distribution that looks something other than (uniform?) random?

------
robbrown451
"intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do."

That is not a precise definition at all, in fact it is an orthogonal concept.
"Thinking that you know" may be happening during intuition, but to claim that
that is what intuition actually IS is just wrong.

Intuition is the thought, not the thought about the thought.

A more precise definition might be something like "knowing -- rightly or
wrongly -- without knowing how you know."

------
autokad
how many are peeved they didn't get Julie's GPA? How can I accept its a
terrible answer with 0 data provided. How much merit can I give to someone
giving advice about investing when they gave me no data to indicate they are
good at it.

------
projectramo
Daniel Kahneman claims that (1) regularity, (2) practice and (3) immediate
feedback are the keys to trusting intuition.

If this is true, I should be able to intuit when I get a lot of upvotes on
Hacker news.

This comment will do okay, I predict. (1-5 votes) But if I had added a joke,
it would have done very well. (10+ votes)

Now that I added that last insight, it will do even better than okay. (3-7
votes).

I'll report back in a day.

~~~
ssambros
So, what's the joke? I want to see you succeed.

~~~
projectramo
Sorry to mislead you. I hadn't thought of a joke, but if I had thought of a
joke and put it in, my posts get a lot more upvotes.

It might be my natural humor, or it might be people reading HN like a laugh
however corny. I don't get feedback on why people vote, and am not allowed to
ask.

------
wolco
I believe he is confusing intuition woth deductive logic.

My intuituion tells me that the gpa is lower then what the group would accept
or he wouldn't use it as an example. Is that intuition, no.

~~~
ska

        Is that intuition, no.
    

Correct, that does not meet the definition of intuition he has proposed.

------
apo
_However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it.

“Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing
that kind of expert intuition,” he explained._

In the short term, definitely. In the long term, however, I disagree. Stock
markets follow highly-regular multi-year cycles. The problem seems to be that
people forget this during the peak or trough of the moment.

Interestingly, this intersects with the third requirement:

 _And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have
to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.”_

Given the long intervals over which stock market cycles operate, there's
little chance to get immediate feedback.

So according to this analysis, most stock pickers can't gain intuition - but
not for the reason stated in the article.

It takes someone with: (a) a really good memory; and (b) a very long time to
play.

~~~
pnw_hazor
In one his other books DK discussed being hired by a major investment bank to
research decision making processes used by their leading investment managers
so they could train incoming bankers.

DK discovered that the successful outcomes of the senior bankers were random
rather than based on skill or experience. His report was not well received.

------
forgotmypw
This gross oversimplification and attempt to quantify intuition is kind of
laughable.

Intuition is the effect of all the different types of knowledge you have
coming together in one converging lighting up of your nervous system.

This is basically ancient genetic knowledge, combined with all the previously
recognized experience traits that are connected to the current experience,
combined with whatever other information that you are receiving.

Trying to estimate a student's GPA is not a good example of how intuition
works.

~~~
jonknee
It was so laughable he got a Nobel prize for it. That's not to say Kahneman is
always right, but he is always worth listening to.

~~~
unmole
Citing someone's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of
Alfred Nobel is probably the worst kind of an appeal to authority.

~~~
beat
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of excellence
in various fields. That means it is not the worst kind of appeal to authority,
but rather the best - referencing a well-known and widely trusted source.

Can you give us a reason we shouldn't trust it _in the general case_ , since
your claim extends to the general, not the specific?

~~~
77pt77
> Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of
> excellence in various fields.

Even if that were true, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics.

It's a completely different prize, given by a different institution, that was
associated much later with the Noble prizes.

