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| Still from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) |
320. Tversky found that "The masses were not equipped to grasp" the message he and Kahneman had to share with them. As Lewis puts it, "The subtleties were beyond them. People needed to be protected from misleading themselves into thinking that their minds were less trustworthy than they actually were" (320).
If someone were to tell you that the lesson of this book was that your "minds could never be trusted," what do you think Tversky would say to counter this summary?
I feel that Tversky would say that rather than never trusting our minds we should instead double check them. A large portion of the book talks about how the human mind is prone to errors. To keep these errors in check and create a more functional society we should be sure to confirm that the option our mind has chosen is the one that is the most viable. I think that since Tversky himself was proved incorrect by stating that humans were conservative Bayesians he wanted people to be able to check themselves and provide ways to improve their brain’s decision making.
ReplyDeleteI couldn’t have said it better myself! When I first started reading this book, I thought, “man I can never trust my decisions again.” But as I read more, I realized that Tversky wasn’t saying to never trust yourself, rather double check yourself.
DeletePersonally, I feel that what Tversky would say would be something along the lines of choosing those words to describe such a complex, layered book, would be almost ignorant. This book, sure, has a lot of “you can not trust your mind all the time” but the catch is that this book cannot be simplified that much. Tversky would probably say that the human mind also cannot be that simplified. But if it had to be, it would be that logic and gut feelings are not the same. If we do have a gut feeling, we should step back and observe to double or triple check.
ReplyDelete-Zoie Newman