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[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everyone and thanks for your listenership conversations with Tyler has grown bigger than ever this year and I hope in some ways at least better than ever now there's a new way you can
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with more to come and there are full transcripts of every episode enhanced with helpful links this year the podcast has featured some of the best known thinkers and doers in the whole world world like today's guest Danny conman or
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supporting the show at conversations withth tyler.com donate thank you conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com [Music] [Applause] thank you for coming Danny you've worked on so many topics let me start with the
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issue of Happiness if you have an experience it seems that how happy you are at the end of The Experience depends on the end of the experience and how good was the peak or how bad was the bottom given that result should we aim to deliberately structure our experiences so they give us more happiness well I mean if you want good memories good endings are really important the question is how important good memories are relative to the
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experience itself but no question ends are very important they're particularly important in the context of goal striving that is whether you achieve a goal or don't achieve a goal colors the whole experience of trying to to get it
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to get to it uh so ends are very important for memories so do people structure their vacations to meet the standard or there's a kind of market failure if they listen to you they would have better vacations I'm not at all
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sure uh that people my guess is that people are conscious of you know that they don't want the peak to be too far from the end that that's my guess and why does duration of pain seem to matter so little for how we evaluate painful
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experiences well you know if you if you were asking what are the evolutionary value then the duration of pain is really not very important what's important is the intensity because the intensity is a measure of the severity
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of threats the duration is really something else it's very striking that it it you know it's completely insignificant when people in many situations it's completely insignificant quite a striking result you also have a
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paper on happiness with Alan Krueger using what you call the day reconstruction method how much people enjoy different experiences and one result from that paper is how much people enjoy spending time with their friends if that's so much more enjoyable
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at the margin why don't people do more it well altogether I don't think that people maximize happiness in that sense and that's one of the reason that I actually left the field of Happiness I'm not not inol in that I was very
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interested in maximizing experience but this doesn't seem to be what people want to do they actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives and that leads in completely different directions than the
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maximization of happiness and do you think that telling people you'll be happier a particular way changes their behavior much or they still stick to maximizing a sense of satisfaction with their lives uh no idea I haven't tried
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you know there is a lot of work these days on trying to make people happier and on trying to coach people uh in the UK in particular it's a whole you know there is I wouldn't call it an industry but it's it's sponsored by government my
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friend Lord leard has started a movement that promotes happiness there's a great deal of that happening and I don't know how successful it is because the Criterion for evaluation it's very difficult to conduct evaluations on those things because people who know they've been subjected to interventions cannot really answer those questions honestly or even if they try so the way to test whether things are successful ful would be to ask a
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person's friends has he become or she become happier and that hasn't been done and that people want to maximize their overall sense of how their life is gone do you think that is ultimately darwinian roots or why is that the
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equilibrium happiness feels good right yeah happiness feels good in the moment but you know it's in the moment what you're left with are your memories and that's a very striking thing that memories stay with you and the reality of life is gone in an
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instant and so memory has a disproportionate weight because it's with us it stays with us it's the only thing we get to keep if you think of your own life have you maximized happiness or the overall sense of how your life has gone neither neither citations no if you miss a flight due to a traffic jam outside your control would you rather be two hours late or just one minute late oh I mean I'm like everybody else I'd rather be two hours late and
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you think even knowing about this doesn't change that you can't talk yourself out of the bias you can talk yourself out of some biases I think I mean I wouldn't generalize on that but it would take you know I I could
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possibly talk myself out of that one by you know by really sort of repeating to myself how stupid it is but it would it would take a lot of work it's not that you can decide once and for all I will be I will not be subject to that bias
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doesn't work that way do you think we overinvestment in the formation and maintenance of memories so there is a lot of investment whether it's too much or too little it probably depends a lot on people's on the amount of consumption of memory that
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people engage in so I for one I'm certainly biased but I do not consume my memories a lot and I you know I almost never go back to photographs not deliberately you know if I stumble on something it will move me but I the idea
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of going back to to Rel a vacation that's not what I do so I have I have little empathy for for and if we think about say sports they're a form of bias right most people root for a home team or they root for their country in the Olympics music arguably is a form of bias there soundtrack music it affects how you view the movie even though it's not changing any facts to what extent should we think of bias as the main thing that gives our lives an
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overall structure just as a Musical soundtrack is what gives structure to a movie well I mean you know that's a tendentious way of labeling things to call them biases I wouldn't call the effect on music you know a biasing
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effect it it completes the experience so and what were your other examples well Sports you're consuming bias right you don't actually think your team is better no but you identify I mean you know it's not there are emotions over which you
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have very little control and it's a fact that you feel Pride when your team wins and in fact you feel Pride if a stranger who lives on your street gets a prize so that tendency to identify with what's around us and when with things that that we are connected to is very powerful we derive a lot of emotion from it and I wouldn't call that a bias because you can call any emotion a bias there's a well-known article by John list where he
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argues if you study how experts trade assets that a lot of what are called biases go away and become quite small what's your reaction to his research it's beautiful research I'm convinced it's right and indeed you don't have to
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go as far as he does to find cases in which people act fairly rationally and people act fairly rationally in routine transactions so if there is a thing that's loss aversion that it plays a large role and that's list research in
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novices they they get attached to things and then they don't want to sell them and they get over it over time and in routine transactions you know when I go and I I spend some money to get shoes I feel no loss aversion for the money and
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certainly the person who tells me the shoes feels no loss AV verion for the shoes it's a routine transaction and it's a whole domain uh in which you know loss aversion doesn't apply now much of your last book is about bias of course and
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much of your next book will be about noise if you think of actual mistakes in human decision-making how do you now see the relative weight of bias versus noise well I would say this so first of all let me explain what I mean by noise I
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mean just Randomness and it's true within individuals but it's especially true among individuals who are supposed to be interchangeable in say organizations can I spend three minutes to explain that so I'll tell you
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where you know the experiment from which my current fascination with noise arose I was working with an insurance company and we did a very standard experiment they constructed cases very routine standard cases expensive cases not we're
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not talking of insuring cars we're talking of ensuring you know Financial f terms for risk of fraud but so you have people who are were specialists in this this is what they do so cases were constructed completely realistic the
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kind of thing that people encounter every day and you have 50 people reading a case and putting a dollar value on it and now I could ask you but I and I asked the executives in the firm and it's a number on which just about
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everybody agrees so suppose you take two people at random two Underwriters at random you average the premium they set you take the difference between them and you divide the difference by the average so by what percentage do people differ
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will would you expect people to differ and there is a common answer that you find you know when I just talk to people and ask them or the executives had the same answer it's somewhere around 10% that's what people expect to see in a well-run firm now what we found was 50% 5 which by the way mean that the those Underwriters were absolutely wasting their time I mean and uh in if you know in the sense of assessing risk so that's
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noise and you find variability across individuals which is not supposed to exist and you find variability within individual depending morning afternoon hot cold I mean a lot of things influence the way that people make judgments whether they are full or or whether they've had lunch or haven't had lunch affects uh judges and things like that now it's hard to say what there is more of noise or bias but one thing is very certain that bias has been
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overestimated at the expense of noise I mean virtually all the literature and a lot of public conversation is about biases but in fact noise is I think extremely important very prevalent and there is an interesting fact that noise and bias are independent sources of error so that reducing either of them redu improves overall accuracy and so there is room for and the procedures by which you would reduce bias and reduce noise are not the same
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so that's what I'm fascinated by these days do you think of low intelligence as yet a third independent source of error or is that somehow subsumed in bias and noise Oh you mean plain stupidity it in some cases yeah it wouldn't really be
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necessarily the same as either bias or noise I mean you know getting getting inadequate information or not not getting adequate information is when it's available is a stupid thing to do and a very common thing and it's not
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exactly a bias and it's not necessarily it it would contribute more to noise than to bias by the way by and large when people collect too little information or are swayed by the first thing that comes to mind you get noise
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rather than bias and do you see the wisdom of crowds as a way of addressing noise in business firms so you take all the Auditors and you somehow construct a weight at average well the wisdom of the crowds will work and and pooling
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opinions will work when erors are independent that is when everybody is inclined to make the same mistake which is then a bias right then having multiple individuals engaged in it if they share their biases you'll get the bias it's going to be worsened and everybody will have much higher confidence in their biased views because other people share them so wisdom of the crowd Works under quite specified conditions um with respect to the
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Underwriters I would expect certainly that you know if you took 12 Underwriters assessing the same risk you would eliminate the noise you would be left with bias but you would eliminate one source of air and the question is
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just price Google for example when it selects when it hires people they have a minimum of four individual making independent assessments of each candidate and that reduces the you know that reduces the standard deviation of er at least by a
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factor of two so is the business World in general adjusting for noise right now or only some highly successful firms you know I don't know enough about that all I do know is that when we pointed out the results the bewildering results of the
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experiment on on Underwriters and there was another unit people who assess the size of claims again about actually it's more than 50% like 58% the thing that were the most striking was that nobody in the organization had any idea that
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this was going on so it took people completely by surprise so my guess now is that wherever people exercise judgment there is noise and as a first rule there is more noise Than People expect and there is more noise than they
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can imagine because it's very difficult to imagine that people have a very different opinion from you yours when your opinion is Right which it is so uh that's that's the way it works so if you're called in by a CEO to give advice
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and I think sometimes you are how can I reduce the noise in my decisions the decisions of the CEO when there's not a simple way to average The Firm doesn't have a dozen CEOs what's your advice my advice is divide and conquer that is
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there is one thing that we know uh that improves the quality quality of judgment I think and this is to delay intuition not I think there is in the audience a friend of mine Gary Klein who is violently opposed to what I'm saying but
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uh uh as are many others but I'm here so so um I think delaying intuition is a very good idea and delaying intuition until the facts are in at hand and looking at dim mentions of the problem separately and independently is just is a better use of information and the problem with intuition is that it forms very quickly so that you need to have special procedures in place to control it except in those rare cases and Gary Klein and
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others have demonstrated that where where you have intuitive expertise you know that that's true for athletes you know they respond intuitively it's true for tres Masters it's true for fir figh captains as Gary Klein has shown so
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that's intuitive expertise I don't think CEOs encounter many problems where they have intuitive expertise they haven't had the opportunity to acquire it so that better slow down and just take more time on each decision break the decision
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up it's not so much a matter of time because you don't want people to get paralyzed by analysis but but it's it's a matter of planning how you're going to make the decision and making it in stages and not acting without an
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intuitive certainty that you're doing the right thing but just delay it until all the information is available and does noise play any useful roles either in businesses or in broader Society or is it just a cost we would like to
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minimize well I mean you know there is one condition under which noise is very useful and that if there is is a selection process uh you know Evolution works on noise so you have random variation and then selection but when there is no selection noise is just a cost but say it were always transparent who would be the winners and who would be the losers from a given decision wouldn't we be too emotional too polarized engaging in too much rent
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seeking and having an ambiguity as to cause and effect is in part what allows us to get along with each other I mean you are you're sort of making a lot of assumptions I'm not used to uh in this in this question you you seem to assume
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that you know there is something very competitive that could be alleviated but there's the old saying say from the Soviet Union that meritocracy is very hard to live under that if you really know how many people are better than you
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are which say a chess player might there's something psychologically oppressive to being downgraded whereas noise you can you can be overconfident more easily and we all know you don't need noise for that I mean you know uh bias will do it for you and and and there is a lot of bias in that direction I mean people clearly overestimate what they can do and how good they are and that's a blessing undoubtedly are there groups of people
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you feel are less subject to biases so there's some papers for instance showing that autistics they have weaker framing effects smaller endowment effects maybe because top- down processing Works in a way do you have an opinion on that
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literature no I don't know it well enough if you think of the literature on what are called cognitive disabilities so ADHD do you think of that as bias or somehow in a different logical category or I mean you know I don't think it's a
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bias no I think it's an attention deficit so it it mean that people have difficulty controlling their attention focusing on what they want to focus on and staying focused uh I that's neither bias nor noise you know bias and noise do not cover the universe there are there are other categories and if you think about the issue of when people think about the world they find some kind of transactions repugnant so sometimes they just don't like to sell
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what they have other times they seem to object to markets say in kidneys or kidney transplants do you view that as bias or where does that come from well I mean you know in the sense that this is a norm and you know there are things
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that we trained or socialized to find disgusting to find repugnant and uh and so there are repugnant transactions and you know you have to treat them as you treat every other moral feeling you know we have lots of moral feelings things
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that we find unacceptable uh without without any ability to really explain why they're unacceptable uh there is there is such a thing as moral emotion there is such a thing as indignation is moral disgust and that's what we're talking about here so you're pessimistic about the ability of psychologists to develop structural explanations of where feelings of repugnance come from well uh in some cases we know and you know you can do
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that associatively I mean the it really depends on the associative structure that is imposed by a given culture so you know to give you a sense of the way that would there is a psychologist Paul Rosen who's done some brilliant
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experiments on that and in in one of the experiments so he has people and they're given a they have a glass of orange juice and they have a sticker and they're asked to write on that sticker Cyanide and to stick it on the juice and
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then to drink the juice and they don't want to now the that's this is something it's an emotion over which people have no control and our socialization has created those emotions in us and you know we're conditioned to have them
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under some conditions other cultures are disgusted by other things Philip tetlock has argued that if we set up longrun tournaments with forecasting and we measure results and we test teams against each other that we can in the
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longer run reduce I think both noise and bias do you agree and do you think there are factors he's overlooking and how his tournaments are set up I mean uh Phil deadlock is another friend but um he's also a hero I mean I I think this is
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beautiful research I think it's proved beyond the shadow of the doubt that when when you have people making forecast for the medium term you know up to 6 months in many situations you can have people thinking carefully without any training
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who do better than CIA analysts you know that's fundamentally what he has what he has shown and he he really knows why he knows how they do it and and the tricks are very simple I mean you know if you made a list of intelligent ways to go at
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problems that's what people do so you know they they view the problem as an instance of a category and then they switch to looking at the problem from the inside and and essentially they adopt different points of view it's not
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the same thing as what I was saying earlier about breaking up uh problem into dimensions and and averaging there's no averaging but there is looking at a problem from multiple dimensions and collecting a lot of information and that's basically what creates super forecasters so if you're picking the Daniel conman super forecasting team what qualities are you looking for in individuals well you know Phil tetlock really has a comprehensive
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list which I'm not going to remember but but at the margin how would you modify they will be intelligent they will be numerate uh they will be open-minded they'll be curious interested in learning eager to train their mind but
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is there a bias left in how Tans pick their teams he picks the teams by results so uh what what he has uh he has people competing in making probabilistic forecasts of strategic or economic events in the medium and short term and
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some people are more accurate than others and after a year of that uh you select the top 2% and you call them super forecaster and that gives them a very good feeling you know to be labeled super forecasters and they do not regress to the means that is the second year they're just about as good at the first year that's the basic finding if you're picking doctors where maybe results are hard to measure in some cases what do you look
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for When selecting doctors in Broad terms well you know I will do the conventional thing I mean I will ask for the about their reputation because that's the best uh you know that's the best measure we have if it's a surgeon
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that I'm uh looking for then there are real indices the main one being the number of times is perform the operation in question so that you know that you know this is what you've got to examine uh because people really do get better
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uh over time and in so measuring how much practice they've had and the practice is fairly specific on different operations so I think I would know how to pick a surgeon there's a good of evidence that people in businesses are
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overconfident but do you think they're more overconfident than they should be well overconfidence has many virtues I mean you know in the first place it's nice I mean it's Pleasant to be overconfident it especially if you're an
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optimist I mean optimism is valuable much more than overconfidence overconfidence is sort of of a side effect but to exaggerate the odds of success is a very useful thing for people it will make them more appealing to others they will get more resources and they will take risks and it's not necessarily good for them the expected expected utility you know of taking risks uh in in the economy is probably marginally negative but for society as a
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whole to have a lot of Optimus taking risks that's what makes for economic progress so I I call that the engine of capitalism really and that that sort of optimism there's a collaboration between a human being and a machine and
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occasionally the human being overrides the machine do you feel the human beings in those situations are on average either too overconfident or too optimistic well I mean you know there are certain criteria that you would want
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to apply uh before you uh put a machine to work you know I thought you want to validate that but once you have a machine making decisions the conditions under which it's a good idea for humans to override them are really well known
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and well understood and and it's not that when you get a feeling that the machine is wrong that's not enough uh you it has to I'll give you an example where it would be okay to override a machine so suppose you have a computer
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that approves loans and then you the banker and you see that the person for whom you know who was approved for a alone has just been arrested for fraud then you will you know you will override the machine that's about the conditions under which
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it's worth it otherwise there have been many experiments and when people override formulas by and large they do worse than if they hadn't intervene so do you side with the analysts such as Martin Ford who see really a very large
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number of jobs being potentially automatable with artificial intelligence machine learning or will we always need the human beings to work with the machines that we will need human beings is I think an illusion uh you know it's
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really very I mean take take chess for example so Kasparov was beaten you know 20 years ago and he went on for a while and it was true for a while saying that teams of chess players with Grandmasters uh of program with with
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Grandmasters uh would be stronger than either and it was true for a while it is true no longer the programs do not need the grand Masters and you know how it happened and it's likely to happen in many other fields I mean it's happening in dermatology uh Dermatology the diagnosis is now better done by programs than than by people and and they are not going to need the person very often that is to have a person intervene or with the
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right to intervene they will sometimes correct mistakes but they will more often I think introduce mistakes so when you have a well-running program leave it alone so we as professors won't need to grade exams anymore and I don't just
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mean multiple choice you run machine learning on papers you find what correlates with a good paper you put the paper through the program look I mean the point is there is so much noise in say grading that it's quite easy to
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imagine a program that would look at various indices and that would do better than you know hurried and tired professors if you consider people working in Psychology or maybe economics or just social sciences do you think
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people persist with their professional and research projects too long or not long enough where's the bias my guess is too long but you know it's a personal bias because of some cost because of sun cost and I think Sun cost is really the
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enemy when you're doing research to Innovative research you ought to recognize that something isn't working and just move on and you know there are different views on that but my sense is that's this is the direction of the bias
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yeah sunos Michael neelen who's a scientist and he works at y combinator he tweeted today if it weren't for sunk costs and my respect for them I wouldn't ever get anything done what do you think I mean you know some it keeps you
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at things right yeah it keeps you at things you stay loyal to your friends you become more trustworthy well that's not you know when we talk about Sun cost we talk about something else so it is not true that attach growing attachment
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to things that you're familiar with and that you like and love and and increasingly trust uh you know that's not some cost that's something else I mean you you know some cost is a fairly specific thing that is that you are
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putting a different value on a move or an investment that you make because of investment that you have already made then you would if you were looking at that denovo and some costs by and large I think are are a negative we know that
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you know when you when you get a new CEO in place in organizations the new CEO has one big advantage is got no sun cost with respect to poor ideas that had you know that the exiting CEO had and couldn't couldn't let go of if you had a
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perfectly rational pure basian would anyone else trust that person well you know I mean would he be nice I I don't think so not you know that's what would matter I don't think you know if you could get me a nice basian that would be fine some questions about psychologists outside of what you've worked on but may be related Freud what do you think of Freud's body of work and has it influenced you at all well if I think of Freud's two principles of
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mental functioning right the notion of Pleasure Principle reality principle it's a little bit like thinking fast and slow in some ways with big differences well I mean you know uh all dichotomies are alike you know in some ways and yeah you know there are some arities oddly enough there is one aspect of froan work that I think did influence me and he has for some reason when I was a graduate student it's too long a story
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but I was I was exposed to chapter seven in the interpretation of dreams and I spent a summer studying chapter 7 of the interpretation of dreams and and in chapter 7 there is basically a theory of attention and like 25 years later I
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published a theory of attention and when it was done I realized that it resembled chapter 7 you know quite a bit so yes personality psychology and five Factor personality theory is that for you a useful way of thinking about human
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beings well you know it's a proven way of think of it's sort of boring the but and I mean that seriously this five Factor thing you know that's about 20 years old and it d Ates personality psychology because it works works better
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than and it's sort of you know it it used to be more exciting uh to have more complicated mechanism but you have something that that seems to work what did you draw from Herbert Simon directly nothing indirectly a lot and
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retrospectively a lot what I mean by indirectly is that you know the air I breathe was influenced by Herbert Simon you know he had the notion of heuristics and it was in the language and and it affected me of course it had affected
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the whole side Guist it had affected the whole culture and retrospectively when I learned Simon but you know but that was after I I was in the field and after I had made some contributions to the field I discovered that I was following his
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footsteps but you know that's not what I had been doing originally I hadn't viewed my myself and in fact I wasn't following in his footsteps retrospectively you find oh yeah this is what I did you know in the historical perspective and also from classical psychology either Yung or P did you draw anything from them or is that just a a forign stream yeah just completely foreign completely foreign if you think about your early work on vision and on
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Israeli bus drivers how did your later work on biases and Thinking Fast thinking slow come out of your very early papers it didn't it was a completely separate thing I worked originally on a concept for for quite a few years on the notion of effort mental
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effort and when I started work on teristics and biases with OSI that wasn't on our mind and it had very little effect when I wrote thinking fast and slow like 10 years ago when I was doing that then it turned out that I
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put together you know all my life's work and the early work did get into thinking fast and slow but it had no effect on my work with Emi but the idea of attention switching costs so Israeli bus drivers it takes time for them to switch attention from one event to another is that not an underlying micro Foundation of your say 1980s papers on bias that people aren't switching their attention to the new problem no no you know it's
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not we didn't think of it that really happens a great deal and quite often it happens in a different way it happens when somebody's insulted because you didn't sight him and so you know he looks at your work and he says that's
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just the same as what I've said before but and and in some way it may be true they maybe some resemblance but it may be true and yet you were completely uninfluenced by that and it's the same thing I was uninfluenced by my earlier
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work I think now your basic distinction between system one and system two Thinking Fast and thinking slow to the extent that particular results do not replicate do you view that as undercutting the system one versus system to distinction or is that immune to the degree of replicability well I think you know that there were whole sets of results that I publish in thinking fast and slow that I wish I hadn't published because uh they they're
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not reliable whether it undercuts the the idea of two systems is really anchored in in a basic sort of fact of experience that the process by which you know you get 2 + 2 is fundamentally different from the way that you get 17
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by 24 and so one of them happens automatically associatively quickly you have no control the other demands effort and is slow and so on that's immune to replication but if there's a bias in individuals and noise why should we
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trust our experience about this apparent sense of having two methods is it three is it four it is not only well in the first place those are those are extremes it doesn't mean that there aren't others it doesn't mean that there is not a
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Continuum but but there is at least a Continuum to be explored or those two extremes of that I'm quite confident do you think that working outside of your native language in any ways influenced your ideas on psychology it makes you
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more aware of thinking fast versus thinking slow or or not it's something I used to think about in the context you know I'm from Israel and and it was thinking whether there was something in common to Israeli intellectuals operating in the in a second language and I thought that in a way it can be an advantage to operate in a second language that there are certain things that that you can you can think about the thing itself self not through the
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words that's it's like lower sunk costs in a way I don't know exactly how to explain it but I I haven't been I thought that this was not a loss for me to do psychology in a in a second language do you have thoughts on the potential cognitive advantages of bilingualism or trilingualism you know it's an empirical matter it's not a matter of thinking and I don't know enough it appears to be advantageous but I don't know the literature if we think
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of therapists psychiatrists internists who are trying somehow to to fix improve or cure people are they underinvestigated by evidence but there is one line of therapy that clearly works and it's evidence-based and it's supported time
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and again and that is one style and it's cognitive behavioral therapy that works and we know it does other things work and we don't some of them do some of them don't and it's primarily seems to depend on the personality of the
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therapist and on the interaction between the personality of the therapist and the personality of the patient whereas cognitive behavior therapy is is a technique and it's a technique that works so that's a fact and and the rest
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is a lot of bias and a society such as Argentina that relies so heavily on psychoanalysis as a psychologist do you see that as bias I mean is it a placebo is there a placebo effect psychoanalysis you know you seem to attribute you you
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seem to think that they think of bias all the time you know it's like I can't imagine why think of sex all the time no I mean I really don't think of bias that much but you know if you want to apply it then clearly there is a lot of psychoanalysis in in Argentina and you know I there's no indication that it makes them more sane if you were to express what is the question about gender and your own work that interests you the most maybe you've
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never done it but what would that be because I have really never been interested in anything to do with gender so I I have never studied looked at differences between gender in the kind of research we did I never been very
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interested in individual differences and and not in gender either so I don't know so it's the means really that interest you the most it's yeah it's the means and it's some extremes but it's not you know cutting and dicing into categories
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being in Israeli and surely you've traveled to many many countries at the very least Sweden right among others there are papers on cross-cultural differences in bargaining or in decision biases how much stock do you put in those results oh I mean I think there's no question that there are cultural differences for one thing for example there are major cultural differences in the attitude to optimists to optimism I mean in in quite a few European
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countries optimism is considered rather foolish you know it's for children in the United States optimism is clearly desirable trait and and similarly there are differences on whether risk taking is considered a good thing or a bad thing and so they're certainly cultural difference and do you think of those in functionalist terms so some people might argue well Israelis they have a tendency to speak directly because they've had a
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lot of Crisis situations where you can't beat around the bush you need to say what you think or we don't no I don't I don't like those kinds of of explanation they they look you know facile to me mhm right now in Psychology in your own work
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what are the open questions you're most interested in well I mean like you know like everybody else I think like many others there are two exciting developments now that one would want to know about I mean one would want to know
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how the brain works or to know more about how the brain works than we do and would would would want to know know about artificial intelligence and when it and if when and how it will become more humanlike in what it can do and
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you're optimistic on that front or I'm optimistic on virtually nothing so but you know that AI is developing faster than anybody could have anticipated no question and so if it continues to develop at at that rate meaning a lot
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faster than we expect then then things are going to happen relatively quickly and what do you think are the main obstacles so some people in Silicon Valley will argue AI is stuck at a kind of local Optimum driverless cars
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although they're ahead of the pace we thought 10 years ago they're may be behind the pace we thought two years ago there's always a problem with emergency situations a policeman waving you on the last 1% maybe is very very difficult
45:55
yeah I mean I can't evaluate that that's a technical problem you know how long it will take to get to clean up the last 1% the question that are of Interest as a psychologist is when can you simulate common sense you know when you know
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there is the the really serious question that people raise about computers is whether they know what they're talking about you know whether they understand what they're talking about and without sense organs and without the the
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perceptual apparatus that we have and and the ability to cause things by acting on the world they can't be exactly like us so but that sense of understanding nobody actually today would I think claim that even the most sophisticated programs have it and do you think we've learned anything General about common sense by having some artificial intelligence what we have learned is that our basic ideas about about what's difficult and what's easy
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what's going to be simple and what's going uh have undergone a series of sort of revolutionary changes so we used to think that perception would be easy and thinking would be difficult turns out that thinking was relatively easy and
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perception was difficult now there are ways of handling perceptual problems and so thinking is difficult again and it's a it's a very interesting series developing thing moving the chess piece is often harder than figuring out the
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best move for the program looking back on your collaboration with Amos tersi which has been written about widely of course there's the famous Michael Lewis book but what is there about that collaboration or about Amos that you feel one could read everything that's out there but still has been underappreciated or undervalued I mean you know so much has been written that I couldn't point out to anything that people have completely ignored you know
47:55
it was just actually the thing that when I think about him it was the mental energy just the the joy of thinking and the mental energy and that made him very charismatic and he was also very funny and being funny uh is a major asset in
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in social life and it turned out to be a major asset in our work because our work our joint work had a touch of irony to it and the fact that we were laughing continuously as we were doing the work was very important to the nature of what
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we did and that stimulates Discovery it breaks down Sun cost bias or what does it do in formal terms I mean what it what it does is it makes you look for funny things about the for us what it did for us I can't generalize uh uh for us we were examining our own thinking and finding stupid things in our own thinking and finding that delightful and uh and very funny so we were very lucky in our in our choice of Topic in many ways our choice of topic
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you know lent itself to a lot of things that are virtually impossible in other fields and your current collaborators on the noise book how would you describe that collaboration and tell us who they are well uh one of them is C sunstein who is a very famous jurist and and also known for writing like three or four books a year so he writes very easily and I write with difficulty and so it's not an accident that we teamed up and uh
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and my the other collaborator is a brilliant Frenchman that you haven't heard of he was for 25 years at McKenzie and he became a director of McKenzie and then he got bored with that and he got a PhD and he teaches and he is just
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extraordinary so I'm very lucky and what will the main theme of that book be well it will be it will be that noise is an underestimated problem and it will be that that there is something deep about two ways of thinking that I was working
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on in Thinking Fast and Slow which I called statistical versus causal and noise is clearly statistical way of looking at things and bias is inherently causal and so the interplay of those forms of thinking and then the idea that
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if you want to if you want to reduce noise uh we we have a pretty good idea of what you should do in order to induce greater uniformity to overcome sort of the vulnerability of people to all sorts of irrelevant influences and when will
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that book be out who knows uh uh it was supposed to be out in the fall of 2020 and I think our Publishers just remembered that there is going to be an presidential election at that time and that probably a lot of other more
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interesting books are going to be appearing and so that postponed it to Spring 2021 we now have some time for questions but Daniel conman thank you very much I have my hearing a on but if I can't hear the question you're I will
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repeat but people will go up to the mics there are mics on each side I will call on you and please questions only this is our chance to hear from Danny conman if you start making a long speecher statement I will cut you off and I also have questions from the iPad so please get in line if you would like to start with the questions here uh first question could prediction markets reduce both bias and Noise well noise certainly but then averaging
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does it and whether prediction markets consistently beat averaging is I think not yet fully established bias no if there is a general bias unless the people who are unbiased also know that they are unbiased I mean unless they have a way
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of being sure so that they can invest more than others and move the price toward the the correct answer but without that without this a symmetry of knowledge if there is a bias it will not going be it won't be reduced no it will
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be reduced first question over here good evening I have two questions but they're short uh my first question is you briefly talked about moral emotions do you see any benefit to shame because I've read conflicting theor there so the
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moral emotion of shame in your thoughts and two what is the impact of counterfactual thinking on happiness in your study oh about shame I really have no idea you know it's there so I don't should one wish that it weren't it's
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probably a force that induces better behavior in lots of people who cannot be would not be controlled in other ways so uh I don't know how important or how useful it is it's painful to the people who feel it and it might be useful to others who might be affected by bad behavior as for counterfactuals and happiness I think that what you refer to there are counterfactual emotions regret is a counterfactual emotion uh guilt is
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a counterfactual emotion and and you can ask in the sense that they are driven by something that didn't happen that could have happened but didn't and some of these emotions seem to be completely Superfluous like regret I mean you know reget and I think people by and large uh would be better off without regret but but it may also be I mean notice what regret is Regret is what happens the next morning and uh and you know if we didn't
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have it then who knows what we might do so uh next question over here yes sir on this topic of uh delaying intuition and I'm delighted that Mr Klein is in the audience because I spent over a decade myself as an intuitive expert and found
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myself mostly using recognition primed decision-making and I'm curious how much you think uh availability bias confirmation bias Etc was still affecting my recognition Prime decision-making and is recognition Prime
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decision- making still useful is it just a best option in a temporally constrained environment oh you know I I think obviously recognition Prime decision making is going to be wonderful If people really uh can recognize things accurately so if
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they can diagnose the situation accurately and and do it quickly and act intuitively on that basis then of course it's beneficial and and there are conditions under which this applies Gary kleene and I became friends over a
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period of six years when we were trying to find out what are the boundaries I mean you know I'm sort of a Critic of intuition and he is very much in favor of intuition of expert intuition and we were trying to find out you know what
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are the boundaries because it's clear that sometimes you know intuition is wonderful and sometimes it's awful and we we ended up with a fairly obvious set of uh conclusions about what it is you're going to have Gary Klein type
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intuition expert intuition if you have a regular world that's condition number one if there are regularities that you can pick up and if you have a lot of a lot of experience and if the feedback is rapid and unequivocal and if you have
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those three conditions which are true for chess players and they're true for spouses recognizing the emotion of their spouse on the telephone to give you a completely different example then intuition will be will develop and it
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will be perfect if those conditions do not develop I don't think that we can trust people who say that they're experts another iPad question Tech entrepreneur Daniel gross suggested that growing up in Israel was a forcing
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function for the tech sector how much was Israel a forcing function for your thinking I don't really completely understand the term forcing function in this in this context I know that Israel afforded many opportunities when I was growing up and
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it probably still does I grew up very early in the history of Israel when the state was small and everyone could make a difference and you really could make a difference difference I mean I was as as a lieutenant in the Army age 21 or 22 I
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I made a difference I created an interviewing system for the whole Army so those kind of experiences that you can do things and that seemed impossible or unlikely that is certainly very liberating and encouraging and and
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induces creativity and I think some of that is actually present now that the state is bigger and more established I I see it I think I was telling you earlier how my grandson in the Israeli Army the kinds of experiences that he has as a sergeant he feels very free you know in in an intelligence unit he feels that he can use his mind and they he can speak his mind and it's going to be wonderful for his future next question over here you
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mentioned earlier that you view many things in the world through a basic lens of pessimism but uh if you were going to challenge yourself to identify something going on in the world now or in the near term uh about which to be optimistic if
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not for yourself for your grandchildren say or very young people what should they be optimistic about I'm going to pass over here I'm curious about what beliefs you currently hold that you think in the next 5 to 10 years might be
58:51
proven Incorrect and alternatively the same question of social science broadly well you know if I if I knew how I would change my mind I would I would have changed my mind so my guess is that there will be completely different
59:08
Frameworks there will be different ways of thinking it's not going to be this or that detail it's going to be and this is what happens to to ideas or to Frameworks uh they at some point become irrelevant the is you know and I know
59:26
that this is going to happen to everything that I believe that you know give it a few decades it's going to be irrelevant and I wish I you know I wish I could peer into the future and know what comes next but you know I can't from the iPad why did the replication crisis take so long to arrive in social psychology I would question that it didn't take very long I mean the the replication crisis started uh was studied first in medicine and where
59:57
there were provocative claims by uh Stanford uh I don't know he's not a statistician is he uh there were provocative claims that most published research in medicine are false and it started there and then psychology came very soon after I mean and in fact psychology is considered to have been quite rapid in in adopting it and there was a crisis and many results uh were questioned I think correctly uh there were aggressors and there were Defenders
1:00:34
and both sides I think behaved quite often quite badly uh but but the result in Psychology and it's amazing within a decade psychology has changed many areas of psychology have change and it's clearly is a better science than it was
1:00:52
10 years ago because of the replication crisis next question I have two questions the first one is the one that that you just answered not exactly the same is what do you think about the replication crasis in Psychology that is
1:01:06
happening recently uh and the second one is the psychologist Martin Salma uh who is also working on uh happiness for four years and he believes there are several Dimensions that consist uh happiness uh do you share the same opinion or not the second question was say Martin saligman his work on happiness that there were several dimensions of Happiness do you share his opinion or not and the first was just more on the replication crisis
1:01:37
no next question over here I have a question about uh bound of rationality over time uh with the rise of the internet the rise of more readily available information uh you have so many prices things you can see on Amazon
1:01:52
uh all this price discrimination and differentiation across products has grown um with that do you think that uh people's biases um are improving or getting worse over time as more information for example over the past 20 30 years has become more readily
1:02:09
available well I mean you know to the extent that you think of biases as representing you know human nature in a broad cultural context uh it hasn't changed over the last 30 years human nature hasn't changed the in certain
1:02:24
domains it's much easier to be rational you know when you can look things up so uh when you can search on the computer instead of going out and searching you know as you had to when I was a young person then of course you can achieve
1:02:40
more rational results than you could but whether it has changed anything significant I doubt it and what is very striking over the last few years that it's not only information that is read available it's misinformation is also
1:02:57
readily available so the net effects you know it used to be very clear that this is all to the good but what we're seeing in the last few years is that there is a very heavy cost of the availability and the ease of uh expression uh that
1:03:14
transmits itself over the Internet next question I'm aware that uh I suffer from biases and I try to hold myself to account and think better um and i' I'm resistant to that of course because I always want to think that whatever
1:03:28
thought I'm having at the moment is the exception and I'm thinking it for good reasons um but I fight against that when I'm trying to persuade somebody else to listen to one of my opinions with an open mind is there some particular
1:03:39
technique that you would recommend for persuading other people to do battle with their own biases because of course they're even more resistant to that than I am when I challenge myself uh you know it's a game when primarily players with
1:03:54
one spouse and uh I and it doesn't work I think by by related question from the iPad how can we use behavioral economics to reduce political polarization it's not that I have an answer and I'm suppressing it here is a
1:04:13
topic where I'm optimistic but I I have no idea you know I don't have an answer but I think the kind of thinking that is going on where you're trying to to look at practi iCal manipulations that can be a the word manipulation is a bad word but I intend it as a good thing uh when you look at at practical moves that can make a difference in the way that people think that way of thinking should be effective in in improving the quality of life and
1:04:47
improving the quality of how how polarization can be reduced there too big a problem for me and I think currently for Behavioral economics next question on a practical note my high school psychology students ask how they can best use your research to make choices about College and Career I mean that's you know that's not my research has absolutely nothing to this uh you know there there are sensible ways of choosing colleges and I think you know
1:05:17
they're well known and and you have to collect a lot of information and you have to ask yourself with the student really wants and where you know he or she will really fit and so there are obvious ways of doing this I have
1:05:31
nothing to add but say you have a student who has a gut feeling that he or she ought to go to some college for a reason he or she cannot articulate are you telling us they should dismiss that feeling and defer to the algorithm a
1:05:43
general rule I I would try to probe and understand you know why where does that feeling come from I mean I don't think are you asking me as a parent say or as an imagined parent you know I I would really probe I would feel free if that's
1:05:59
a very expensive college and you know strong I I think I would feel free to probe where does that strong wish come from and uh can we discuss it uh next question so uh many behavioral economists use the notion of rationality
1:06:17
and neoclassical economics as a normative Benchmark and you have said that you don't think that's necessarily a good normative uh Benchmark and instead something like reasonableness is a better way to think about U those things could you say more about how we might identify or or Define and identify this reasonableness the rational agent models are built on the notion of consistency being the one guiding principle so your beliefs and your
1:06:47
preferences have to be internally consistent nobody can tell you what to believe nobody can tell you what what you want but your beliefs and Sh the only thing we know is that you ought to be consistent otherwise you're not rational you know that's as a normative principle that consistency is the only normative principle that strikes me as pretty odd there are other things that seem to matter there is there is human nature and human nature is not
1:07:17
consistent I mean we are context dependent so our emotions are context dependent we ought to have normative theories that are adapted to to who we are as people as humans and uh the idea of consistency is an infeasible it's completely unfeasible for a finite mind than we have finite Minds so on that ground alone you know it would be questionable as the principle for a normative model but one would want a normative theory that takes into account
1:07:55
human nature and which the principle of consistency doesn't next question over here so you talked a little bit about like uh cultural differences I was just wondering do you think that there are like some cultural aspects that are
1:08:11
costly and some that are really good and do you think that something like increased migration or open borders would kind of push would would dissolve these cultural differences and push toward like a more optimal equilibrium
1:08:24
H Way Beyond what I can talk about you know responsibly uh you know that migration automatically causes uh you know cultural uh amalgamation you know that's questionable I have no idea how to answer your question next question over on this side we've run out
1:08:49
Daniel thank you very much it's been a great honor to have you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler please don't forget to visit conversations withth tyler.com donate to support the show before the year's end