Reddit reviews Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

I wrote a quick script to search the full text of HPMOR and return everything italicized and in title case, which I think got most of the books mentioned in the text:

Book title|Author|Mentioned in chapter(s)|Links|Notes
:---|:---|:---|:---|:---
Encyclopaedia Britannica| |7|Wikipedia|Encyclopaedia
Financial Times| |7|Wikipedia|Newspaper
The Feynman Lectures on Physics|Richard P. Feynman|8|Wikipedia|Full text is available online here
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases|Amos Tversky|8|Amazon|
Language in Thought and Action|S.I. Hayakawa|8|Amazon Wikipedia |
Influence: Science and Practice|Robert B. Cialdini|8|Wikipedia|Textbook. See also Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making|Reid Hastie and Robyn Dawes|8|Amazon |Textbook
Godel, Escher, Bach|Douglas Hofstadter|8, 22|Amazon Wikipedia|
A Step Farther Out|Jerry Pournelle|8|Amazon|
The Lord of the Rings|J.R.R. Tolkien|17|Wikipedia|
Atlas Shrugged|Ayn Rand|20, 98|Wikipedia|
Chimpanzee Politics|Frans de Waal|24|Amazon|
Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality|Lewis Carroll Epstein|35, 102|Amazon|
Second Foundation|Isaac Asimov|86|Wikipedia|Third novel in the Foundation Series
Childcraft: A Guide For Parents| |91|Amazon|Not useful if your child has a mysterious dark side

Also, this probably isn't technically what the OP was asking, but since the script returned fictional titles along with real ones, I went ahead and included them too:

Book title|Mentioned in chapter(s)
:---|:---
The Quibbler|6, 27, 38, 63, 72, 86
Hogwarts: A History|8, 73, 79
Modern Magical History|8
Magical Theory|16
Intermediate Potion Making|17
Occlumency: The Hidden Arte|21
Daily Prophet|22, 25, 26, 27, 35, 38, 53, 69, 77, 84, 86, 108
Magical Mnemonics|29
The Skeptical Wizard|29
Vegetable Cunning|48
Beauxbatons: A History|63
Moste Potente Potions|78
Toronto Magical Tribune|86
New Zealand Spellcrafter's Diurnal Notice|86
American Mage|86

As others mentioned, TVTropes has a virtually-exhaustive list of allusions to other works, which includes books that aren't explicitly named in the text, like Ender's Game

It's more complicated than that.

When I teach intro stats, I try to say "the sample is not the population" and "the estimate is not the parameter" at least once a day every lecture after these concepts are introduced. So I am certainly not "glossing over" the subject. But how many of these students (many of whom don't want to take the class but are required to by some major) will really understand this (or any concepts from the course) a year later? I don't know.

When I teach theory, I also say these things often (along with "theta hat is not theta"), often with "of course you know this, just a reminder" because the students in the theory course are supposed to be more sophisticated than those in the intro course.

But consider that the bootstrap does treat theta hat as if it were theta (or F hat as if it were F for the nonparametric bootstrap). It takes a very sophisticated view to see that the bootstrap is doing what seems like an elementary error but in a very sophisticated way, using elaborate theory (incomprehensible to most users) to quantify exactly how much error this "mistake" entails and correcting for it.

I have a joke about the "bootstrap philosophy of statistics" which is: the bootstrap is more comprehensible than the rest of that stuff (frequentist, Bayes, minimum description length, whatever), so just do it. I have been told by famous scientists "That's no joke, we really think that". This tells me that it isn't just the students in the intro course who have problems with statistics.

The old Kahneman and Tversky stuff (in the book Judgment under Uncertainty) says not only that naive notions of statistics are all wrong, but that, if you make the question tricky and don't give people time to calculate but force them to rely on intuition, then even experts (PhD statisticians) make the same mistakes. That is you don't have good intuition about statistics. What you do have is knowledge of how to do correct calculations instead of relying on faulty intuition.

So how are the poor intro stats students, who are not being taught how to correctly calculate in many cases because the calculations are over their heads, supposed to develop a good intuition? I don't know.

There's quite a big literature on mistakes we consistently make when we perceive things (like optical illusions, for instance) and to the extent that philosophy intersects with psychology, there's a big field about how we make mistakes in rationality (Tversky and Kahneman and everything that goes along with them, for instance). What rationality is more generally is also a massive philosophical topic on its own, plus it intersects with many other areas of philosophy, like morality and the problem of akrasia.

And of course epistemology is all about the study of the mistakes we make when we try to understand things, or the mistakes that we don't make, depending on how hopeful you are about epistemology's ability to solve problems in the field. Bayesians for instance have a formula that, at least in theory, helps us solve our stupidity just by following the formula. Other epistemological enterprises similarly attempt to solve issues of misapprehension or misconstruction of reality, or truth, or whatever it is we miss when fuck up.

"Stupidity" itself is a pretty loaded term - I myself am not really sure that stupidity makes much sense. Who's stupider - someone who's really good at math but bad at chemistry, or someone really good at chemistry but bad at math? Are they both smarter than a good writer? It's sort of a mess. I think this is why there's not much philosophy of stupidity. Stupidity itself is (for lack of a better term) a stupid concept, or (because I can think of many better terms) stupidity is an unhelpful designation. It fails to carve reality at the joints (witness the distinction most everyone agrees that we have to make between "book smarts" and "street smarts," or "intelligence" and "social intelligence," or any number of other distinctions). It doesn't pick out anything particularly interesting. "Stupid" is pretty much just a word we use to facilitate socially acceptable shaming of people who fail to conform to certain intellectual paradigms that on other occasions we are perfectly happy to criticize people for conforming to (by calling them nerds, for instance).

I could go on forever down other tangents too - if you could narrow down what you mean by "stupidity" that would definitely help. "Misapprehension" suggests illusions and other cases of false perception, as I noted above, so maybe that's what you're thinking of, but of course in normal language I'm not sure we'd really call someone fooled by an optical illusion "stupid," so perhaps you have other things in mind. Words like "error" and "mistakes" don't really pick anything out specifically, I think, at least not to my mind. Error theory in morality shares characteristics with these about errors we make in other epistemological situations (like realism more generally) but it is to a large extent its own topic, as are errors in any other instance I can think of. I would want to characterize errors based on the area of inquiry, not lump them all under "errors." To the extent errors/mistakes can all be lumped together, I think now we're just doing epistemology. So perhaps that is the best response to your post: yes, there is a philosophy of stupidity. It is epistemology, a rich and flourishing field, and people have mixed opinions about how stupid we are and how stupid we have to be, given what we can know about the world.

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

He just put out a book last year called Thinking, Fast and Slow that summarises this and all the work he has done since, but in a Gladwell-ish way. It’s pretty interesting.

If you're wanting a citation, you'll probably want to go directly to Judgment under Uncertainty. Thinking Fast and Slow is Kahneman's attempt at a mass audience pop psych book -- or rather an attempt to shut every pop psych author the hell up.

More contemporary philosophy is interesting too. A bit more complex but very rewarding. My path into it was religious philosophy so I read people like William Lane Craig, Bertrand Russel, Plantinga, and various bloggers. It's surprising how many bored philosophy grad students have blogs.

For heuristics and biases you'll be fine with anything by Tversky and/or Khaneman. They essentially started the field and then literally wrote the book. For a fusion of philosophy and applied rationality try Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment.

Got it, thanks. Haven't read Thinking Fast and Slow but I've got a copy of it's ancestor, Judgment Under Uncertainty, and I'd strongly recommend it. Note that the linked copy is ridonkulously expensive.

This book explain the startup way of thinking nicely.

What.

> Generally, almost all human beings believe in a cosmos of spiritual dimensions, which exist beyond our world; in heavens and hells.

No.

[edit] Oh God, he quotes Nietzsche.

> Fire, plague and poisoned waters. War, death and genocide.

> No mercy on they who deserve none.

> Lucifer 2016

So .. Vote Trump?

[edit] Jesus Christ, I wish I could travel back in time and hand Nietzsche a copy of Heuristics and Biases. On the other hand, he'd probably just say he'd overcome them all and was now only the more assured in his plan to make war on the true subhumans: religious people.

Remember people: science kills its heroes. It does Nietzsche credit, that in his most lucid moments he dreamt of being surpassed.

http://www.amazon.com/Mindless-Eating-More-Than-Think/dp/0345526880/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332061191&sr=1-1

and

http://www.amazon.com/Judgment-under-Uncertainty-Heuristics-Biases/dp/0521284147/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332061219&sr=1-1