Table of Contents

• 1. "Bricking"
• 2. Reading Isn't Dead
• 3. The Issues with Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

1. A cool concept called: "Brick".

• Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/brick-phone-lock-review/
• This is a small physical device (costs $53) that you can stick to a refrigerator (for instance).
• Once you set up the companion app and add a few apps (such as IG, Tiktok, YT), you need to physically tap the Brick device to lock these apps.
• Once locked, the only way to unlock them is by physically bricking again.
• This is great if you spend less time home and work out of office. You will be less distracted when you are out and about.
• I am a little skeptical about its utility if you work from home, though. After all, you are only a few steps away from your refrigerator to unbrick your social apps. But, one can be a little creative with setting up the device at home where you are less inclined to wander about.
• I think it is worth a try.

2. Reading isn't Dead

• Source: https://www.persuasion.community/p/reading-isnt-dead
• Author argues that reading is as popular as ever:
  • Books are selling more than they used to in the past. Linked some statistics on this; didn't read it, so can't confirm.
  • Social Media usage has stalled. Again, linked some statistics. Didn't read; so can't confirm.
  • Reading has survived other technologies from the past, such as Radio, TV, Wi-Fi. If it has survived these, surely, it will survive the doomscrolling apocalypse.
  • People are aware that anything worth pursuing in the realm of ideas happen through writing books; not through mere video consumption, even if it is watching intellectual podcasts. In fact, influential people often invited to these podcasts happen to have written a book. Author also cites how every major religion or any long-lived movement (like Communism, Environmentalism, American Revolution) could not have happened without a book.
• I think the author is right in the sense that reading is still something that people aspire to do; there is an intuitive understanding of how important reading for any kind of meaningful trajectory in one's life.
• However, I worry that the quality of books have decreased tremendously. If books are selling more than ever, it is worth investigating as to what kind of books are being consumed.
• This points to the larger question — Are all kinds of reading equal? Is reading just for the sake of reading meaningful? Also, social media usage may have stalled, but does it show any indication of declining? If it is stalled at 8 hours (say), I'd argue that is still pretty meaningful enough.
• As someone who has read a lot of books the past few years, I find sitting through, re-reading, and writing about it more meaningful. Without that, I find reading to be not that meaningful.
• Anyway, an interesting read.

3. The Issues with Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• Source: https://www.ejpe.org/journal/article/view/1075/753
• Gerd Gigerenzer, a German psychologist I just discovered, talks about the legacy of Daniel Kahneman.
• Daniel Kahneman is the famous author of Thinking Fast and Slow, where he introduces the dichotomous concept of System 1 (Intuitive) and System 2 (rule-based, more deliberate) thinking.
• Gigerenzer seems to be an intellectual opponent of Kahneman and Tversky. As far as I understand from the article, Gigerenzer contends that:
  • Mathematical Probability is valuable;
  • Humans are intuitively statisticians; i.e., they think in terms of probability; and
  • Intuition is, thus, valuable because it conforms to laws of probability, and probabilistic thinking is reasoning.
• It seems Kahneman and Tversky disagree with this:
  • They undermine human intuitive thinking; say that human judgment is riddled with "systematic biases".
  • They undermine the connection between human intuition and probabilistic thinking, to the point that they seem to imply the inevitability of human intuition to do probabilistic thinking correctly.
  • This further has the effect to make one think that humans are "irrational" by default, riddled with "cognitive biases".
• I like how Gigerenzer draws out the implications of "humans are riddled with cognitive biases" outlook:
  • Bad decisions used to be explained in terms of greed, lust, seduction, group-think, other desires and anxieties.
  • Now, the new message seems to be that human thinking itself is faulty.
  • This led to a flood of opportunities for blaming the victim, Gigerenzer says.
  • Example 1:
    • Smoking, addiction, compulsive gambling, and obesity epidemic were attributed to our inner biases, as opposed to the activities of the tobacco, gambling, or fast-food industries.
  • Example 2:
    • Even during the financial crisis of 2008, the Deutsche Bank Research published an article: "Homo Economicus — Or More Like Homer Simpson?". The article featured 17 cognitive biases, suggesting these as causes of the crisis. Yet, according to the US DoJ, it was the Deutsche Bank that misled investors and contributed directly to an international financial crisis.
  • Example 3:
    • An Alaskan federal jury awarded $5.3 billion to fishermen and others whose livelihoods had been devastated by the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
    • When Exxon waged its appeal, it referred to studies that reported jurors' decision processes as "unreliable, erratic, and unpredictable". It also claimed that "juror are generally incapable of performing the task the law assigns to them in punitive damage cases".
    • The results served Exxon well in court. In fact, Exxon had funded the very research, which is published in Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide. It became part of a new field known as behavioral law and economics.
    • Contributors to the book focused exclusively on the error of jurors, not on those of Exxon.
  • Eventually, few societal disasters were left that had not been attributed to people's overconfidence, base rate neglect, the conjunction fallacy, or some other mental quirk.
• Gigerenzer's overall main contentions with Kahneman and Tversky:
  • Contention 1: Narrow Norms
    • Kahneman and Tversky contend that prior probabilities are not taken into consideration in intuitive thinkings.
    • Gigerenzer cites other research works that undermine this. Essentially, issues with random sampling.
    • Gigerenzer calls this flaws in researchers' statistical thinking itself that are misinterpreted as cognitive biases of ordinary people.
    • Worth quoting here: "The belief that language must be understood in terms of pure logic, without any layers of meaning, and that people who intuitively read between the lines suffer from cognitive biases, is one of the most puzzling narrow norms of the heuristics-and-biases program."
    • To summarize, the issue was with thinking there is a "deviation" — between human judgment and a logical norm. This calibrated the researchers' to study this "deviation" and understand what is "wrong" with human judgment.
    • Apparently, now researchers have moved on to study human judgment (without caring to compare against a narrow norm). Gigerenzer calls this progress.
  • Contention 2: Probability Theory Does Not Necessarily Apply to Singular Events
    • Kahneman believed that every text problem he invented had a single correct answer, according to Gigerenzer.
    • Gigerenzer says that there is disagreement amongst statisticians themselves on the question: Can Probability Theory be applied to Singular Events?
      • Is this Frequentist vs Bayesian?
      • For more on this, will read this later: To Be a Frequentist or Bayesian? Five Positions in a Spectrum by Hanti Lin
    • What he finds wrong about Kahneman is his dogmatic insisting that it DOES apply to singular events.
    • Also, like this quote from Gigerenzer:
      • "The fascinating ability of the human mind to infer the various meanings of probable and and from the content and context of a sentence is known as semantic inference. These inferences are necessary to decode the polysemous nature of natural languages, and have been studied by linguists (e.g., Dulany and Hilton 1991, Grice 1989). The narrow logical norm and the focus on demonstrating biases has prevented researchers from seeing the truly interesting question: How do minds make these intelligent inferences?"
  • Contention 3: The Bias Bias
    • Gigerenzer defines it as: "The tendency to see systematic biases in behavior even when there is only unsystematic error or no verifiable error at all."
    • Worth quoting: "My general point is not that statistical thinking can be difficult (although it often is). Rather, it is the overconfidence of researchers that they know the right answer and all others are wrong. More humility, curiosity, and willingness to give people the benefit of doubt would be helpful for making progress."
• It's worth reading the full paper to understand the details of these contentions with examples.
• Overall, Gigerenzer lauds Kahneman's work for the following:
  1. It brought psychology into economics (once again)
  2. It brought heuristics to the attention of social scientists.
  3. It brought statistical thinking to the attention of the general public.
• Gigerenzer claims the following as missed opportunities:
  1. Bringing psychology into economics not only as a source of irrationality but also a source of genuine intelligence.
  2. Moving beyond label and dichotomies towards formal models of heuristics.
  3. Shifting from the content-blind ideal of logical rationality to the study of ecological rationality.
  4. Moving from seeking errors in statistical thinking to actively teaching statistical thinking.
• Overall Impressions:
  • As someone who read Thinking Fast and Slow about 10 years and remember being impressed, I am glad Gigerenzer breaks down his main contentions with Kahneman precisely with all the necessary details.
  • Another reminder that popular books may be good for introducing one to the subject, but often present an incomplete picture or undermine other perspectives on the topic.
  • I didn't like the Euro-centric history that Gigerenzer writes in the beginning. "Humankind was slow to discover mathematical probability". As if probabilistic thinking did not exist in other cultures or civilizations. For example, Islamic legal thought (Fiqh) has a rich history in probabilistic thinking.
    • Worth reading The Economy of Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory in this regard.
  • I also want to understand how true this is: Probability and Reasoning are two sides of the same coin
  • Is mathematics not an abstract entity but one intricately woven into reality?
    • I wonder if Kurt Gödel would agree with this phrasing?
  • I wonder what connection intuitive reasoning has with the concept of fitrah?
  • It seems the dichotomous concept of System 1 and System 2 is largely being adapted in LLM development.
    • I wonder what kind of implications will this have with how LLMs respond and how we interact with it?
    • Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17419
  • Probability Theory is a kind of abstraction:
    • Is this abstraction taking away our attention from the world from which it was abstracted?
    • For example: By abstracting natural resources that are extracted from the earth into numbers, is it redirecting our attention to abstracted numbers and making us inattentive to these natural resources?
    • Same can be said of workers employed, animals killed, etc.
    • Need to read about this more and think about it deeply
  • Last thing: Most of the research discussed here is done to undergraduate students in the West.
    • Joe Henrich, author of The WEIRDest people in the World, remind us such research is woefully incomplete to understand all societies in the world.
    • Question: How can ideas discussed here be linked to Joe Henrich's work?
    • I noticed that Joe Henrich and Gerd Gigerenzer are mentioned in a common paper: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/publications/culture-important-bounded-rationality. Worth checking out if I want to investigate it further.