
The King of Human Error: Michael Lewis on Daniel Kahneman (2011) - tim_sw
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112
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ArkyBeagle
This was a good read, as was "Thinking Fast and Slow".

I remember thinking, while watching "The Mentalist[1]" that people who are
practiced in that sort of deception that the character Patrick Jane used
probably mainly understand how to execute exploits on the interface between
System 1 and System 2 thinking.

The wheel of fortune story sort of confirms that for me now.

[1] That was a pretty good show for network, for a while.

It also makes me wonder if people who are mistrustful of System 1 or somehow
depend more on System 2 are somehow perceived as obnoxious by people who are
not. I would think that a very potent source of friction.

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elcapitan
I was wondering, is Moneyball actually a good read in case you are not
American and not really familiar with Baseball? (because I liked some of
Michael Lewis' other books).

Btw, there's an upcoming Coursera course on Mathletics/Moneyball:
[https://www.coursera.org/course/mathletics](https://www.coursera.org/course/mathletics)

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ArkyBeagle
I would think so. Baseball is only a ... background element in the story,
really. Warning: I used to follow baseball closely, so I may need to recuse
myself :)

IMO, this is one book of a "trilogy" \- the Kahneman book, "Moneyball" and
"The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande. They all came out in roughly the
same time and are three different views on this problem.

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elcapitan
Interesting - how does the Checklist Manifesto relate to that? Because of
human error/misperceptions? I only had a quick look at it once.

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ArkyBeagle
There's a lot of book there, but the short riff is :

\- checklists reduce error \- surgical staff may or may not embrace checklists
even when they know it reduces error. \- they backslide and the error rate
comes back.

Using "Fast and Slow" as a template, they have a weird and hard to understand
balance between their System 1 and System 2 thinking.

I've used a basic "checklist" ( eg, the motor has to be at X RPM +/\- Y RPM
for X seconds before you disengage the clutch ) as the central element in some
controls automation, and I've seen people be really confused by that. Machines
people do not think in terms of "proofs" even though they embrace chunked
operations.

