Just a note

Little did I know that I was talking about myself when I wrote about Salieri in: it's all too human. Life has strange turns. And for once, I had prepared myself. But one can never be too prepared. When the challenging is reaching that of a Salieri scale. :-)

Notes on Daniel Kahneman's Lecture on Cognition

(recommended again by Jr. - this is such an insightful lecture that we have been referring back to it all the time. so i am re-reading it more carefully and taking notes. )

MAPS OF BOUNDED RATIONALITY: A PERSPECTIVE ON INTUITIVE JUDGMENT
AND CHOICE

Nobel Prize Lecture, December 8, 2002

by DANIEL KAHNEMAN

the cocept of two systems of ratinality: intuition and reasoning.

System 1: fast, automatic, effortless, associative, and difficult to control or modify.
System 2: slower, serial, effortful, and deliberately controlled; they are also relatively
flexible and potentially rule-governed.

perception and intuition: intuitive judgments deal with concepts as well as with percepts, and can be evoked by language.

impressions vs. judgement: nonveral; explicit, intentional

1. accessibility: this is the most important concept here, concerning how with a given situation, some information is more readily accessible to the mind than others, which evidenntly would lead to rather quick (but not necessarily correct) intuitive judgement of the situation. (my comment: knowing what will follow, this is probably THE error most human beings make day in and day out)

a simple but illuminating example: mind grasps the average, but not the sum, of, say, a set of china pieces.

physical properties such as size, distance and loudness,
similarity
causal propensity
surprisingness
affective valence
mood
context

"perception is a choice of which we are not aware, and we perceive what has been chosen."

"Uncertainty is poorly represented in intuition, as well as in perception. in other words, perception and intuition are always confidently carried out." (ouch! the more primitive, the less knowledgeable, the more confident.)

2. Framing effect: "Invariance cannot be achieved by a finite mind. " passive adoption. (i shall call this "the lazy mind effect" that people perceive or reach decisions mostly within a finite context (framed). simple examples include answers are determined by how questions are asked in the lecture. however, one can easily stretch this to even how people in general live their lives within the cultural and societal context and thus become part of the context. - my newly acquired interest in cultural determinism)

"The impossibility of invariance raises significant doubts about the descriptive
realism of rational-choice models (Tversky & Kahneman, 1986). Absent a
system that reliably generates appropriate canonical representations, intuitive
decisions will be shaped by the factors that determine the accessibility of different
features of the situation. Highly accessible features will influence decisions,
while features of low accessibility will be largely ignored. Unfortunately,
there is no reason to believe that the most accessible features are also the
most relevant to a good decision."

3. change rules. how people make decisions on based on totality but the change of states. examples are strong emotions attaching to the change of wealth (not total assets); risk taking based on the relative small stake against total wealth; risk aversion if total wealth not considered.

4. attribute substitution.

"people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce
the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler
judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but
sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors.”

"A judgment is said to be mediated by
a heuristic when the individual assesses a specified target attribute of a judgment
object by substituting a related heuristic attribute that comes more readily
to mind." (the inexhaustible use of bad analogies in reasoning and understanding came to mind)

attribute substitution: a little bit difficult to comprehend (read twice to get it). example: when people are asked to estimate "probability" answered instead as if they are asked to guess "similarity". as the latter is the more accesible attribute. statistical attribute, while not sophisticated by itself, is less accessible and therefore not used. (the improtance of self-consiousness and enhancing attention to rules)

"Affective valence is a natural assessment, and therefore
a candidate for substitution in the numerous responses that express attitudes."

"an automatic affective valuation – the emotional core of an attitude – is the main determinant of many judgments and behaviors."

"In terms of the scope of responses that it governs, the natural assessment of
affect should join representativeness and availability in the list of general-purpose
heuristic attributes."

5. THE ACCESSIBILITY OF CORRECTIVE THOUGHTS

the ability of system 2 to monitor 1: lax, limited and anchored upon intuitive thinking. affected by time pressure, multitasking, stress, and good mood. positively correlated with intelligence.

6. PROTOTYPE HEURISTICS

roughly described as the substitution of an average for a sum (how about individual?)

"The value of an extensional attribute in a set is an aggregate (not necessarily additive) of the values over its extension. The argument of this section is that the extensional attributes in these tasks are low in accessibility, and are therefore candidates for heuristic substitution."

"A prototype heuristic is the label for the process of substituting an attribute of a prototype for an extensional attribute of its category"

my favorite: the china sets

"a single generic proposition: “Highly accessible impressions produced by System 1 control judgments and preferences, unless modified or overridden by the deliberate operations of System 2.”"