summary of Khanemans work

Daniel Kahneman is an American Israeli psychologist that is mot famous for his philosophies on judgement. In his 2011 article by the New York times he goes over his philosophies about judgement and how he came to understand them with the article. Starting with his military career, as a military psychologist judging officer candidates in the Israeli army during this period he came up with the term the illusion of validity which can be summarized as the idea that no matter how useless the thing your doing is you will continue to do it if you feel like it validates you the best example Kahneman gives of this is when he and his colleagues are making predictions for the officer candidate school they are told that their predictions are as good as educated guess however they continue to make predictions because it gave them the illusion that they were valid. Kahneman then continues and mentions his next philosophy known as cognitive fallacy however he doesn’t give a direct explanation of it, however due to the piece we can surmise that it has something to do with false beliefs and mistakes in judgment due to these beliefs. After a cognitive fallacy he then reflects on the time he spent in the army and how you can see the beginnings of his psychology philosophy on judgement and how this experience began to shape it he also use this time in the army to set up his next idea which is W.Y.S.I.A.T.I which is an acronym for the phrase “what you see is all that you get”  this phrase is best exemplified by his time in the army where they were creating stories for all the officer candidates just from what they could see on the surface  after the army he moves to wall street to go to a brokerage firm to meet his friends Richard thaler and Amos Tversky where he learns about buying and selling stocks  from Richard thaler and how it is mostly luck except for the really good brokers who can predict the market as well as how buyers and sellers are very similar people so it is hard to predict what will happen with them upon leaving wall street for a few years Kahneman is invited back for a dinner where he is supposed to speak in front of 25 wealth advisers during the dinner he meets the advisers who have been at their firms the longest and realizes that there no different than any other adviser there and which he and his friend thaler bring to management but they give no real response and swept it under the rug they also brought these findings to the advisers who also had no response and still believed that there work was skill rather than luck this was a great example of the final philosophy in the illusion of skill. The illusion of skill is the belief that what someone is doing is skill, yet it is most likely something else like luck. I personally agree with Kahneman’s philosophies and how they relate to the real world with each one being able to be seen in day to day life.   

Comments 2

  • This summary is basically a robust list summary. You follow the sequence of his ideas as presented in his article rather than establishing a context of your own in which the summary of his ideas is embedded with a purpose to fulfill and a function to play.

    You summary should be much more selective and work to orient readers to his big ideas as well as give them a sense of the smaller concepts that will be relevant in your paper. Also, you should emulate Henig and Yoshino and establish your own context (the prompt can help here) in which Kahneman’s ideas matter.

  • The one other thing I’d say is that the examples you use to illustrate and explain Kahneman’s ideas (WYSIATI especially) aren’t yet sufficiently fleshed out to be useful to a reader unfamiliar with his work. You’ve essentially referenced the examples. If your reader were very familiar with Kahneman’s work, that would be ok, but since your reader isn’t familiar with K’s work, you need to provide everything they need to make sense of Kahneman’s concepts.

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