I started that book long before the controversy around the reproducibility of some of the sections was widely discussed in public.
I got to the section on priming and immediately thought "what ridiculous bullshit", looked up the original paper and saw that my suspicions we absolutely justified. The statistical analysis of the results is garbage and the experiment design doesn't pass some basic sanity checks.
If this were some sort of purely pop-psych book I would have just brushed it off. Journalists often have to write to a deadline and don't have to time to dive into the details of everything, especially if it makes a good story otherwise.
However I was completely put off by the fact that this was written by someone who made understanding how we reason his life's work. In the book he even says something along the lines of "this sounds unbelievable but you have to accept it!"
I felt somewhat validated that years later this became a more widely accepted criticism but the popularity of both that book and the unquestioned esteem that Kahneman commands really repulsed me. The biggest value of that book is as an object lesson on why we have a reproducibility crisis in the first place. If even prize winning economists/psychologists won't ask the most basic questions about what they're being told there's no hope for the field.
This! The book really should have been subtitled The Ludic Fallacy Run Amok. Even putting the priming disaster aside, it's filled with grand generalisations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioural experiments. I find it mind boggling that so many otherwise intelligent people don't find anything wrong with it.
I have not read the book yet - would you please explain what about that priming section you did not like? Is it something specific that Kahneman says or the whole concept of priming? If it is the later, I would like to know what you critique, because I have always considered priming something obvious that I use to explain common life experiences without questioning it.
I got to the section on priming and immediately thought "what ridiculous bullshit", looked up the original paper and saw that my suspicions we absolutely justified. The statistical analysis of the results is garbage and the experiment design doesn't pass some basic sanity checks.
If this were some sort of purely pop-psych book I would have just brushed it off. Journalists often have to write to a deadline and don't have to time to dive into the details of everything, especially if it makes a good story otherwise.
However I was completely put off by the fact that this was written by someone who made understanding how we reason his life's work. In the book he even says something along the lines of "this sounds unbelievable but you have to accept it!"
I felt somewhat validated that years later this became a more widely accepted criticism but the popularity of both that book and the unquestioned esteem that Kahneman commands really repulsed me. The biggest value of that book is as an object lesson on why we have a reproducibility crisis in the first place. If even prize winning economists/psychologists won't ask the most basic questions about what they're being told there's no hope for the field.