Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
"Intuitive predictions are almost completely insensitive to the actual predictive quality of the evidence," writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow. A lot of our thinking takes place in the part of our brain which is good at making quick connections, quickly detecting patterns, and making fast judgments. The deeper and more thoughtful part … Continue reading Intuitive Predictions and Intensity Matching
Regression to the mean, the idea that there is an average outcome that can be expected and that overtime individual outliers from the average will revert back toward that average, is a boring phenomenon on its own. If you think about it in the context of driving to work and counting your red lights, you … Continue reading Regression to the Mean Versus Causal Thinking
Regression to the mean is seriously underrated. In sports, stock market funds, and biological trends like generational height differences, regression to the mean is a powerful, yet misunderstood phenomenon. A rookie athlete may have a standout first year, only to perform less spectacularly the following year. An index fund may outperform all others one year, … Continue reading Praise, Punishment, & Regression to the Mean
Arguments about stereotypes are common in the world today. In the United States we have worked very hard to push back against stereotypes by bringing them into view so that we can address them directly to dispel incorrect and harmful prejudices. In the circles I am usually a part of, eliminating stereotypes is universally applauded, … Continue reading Valid Stereotypes?
When we think about individual outcomes we usually think about independent causal structures. A car accident happened because a person was switching their Spotify playlist and accidently ran a red light. A person stole from a grocery store because they had poor moral character which came from a poor cultural upbringing. A build-up of electrical … Continue reading Base Rates
This morning, while reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, I came across an idea that was new to me. Harari writes, "Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. ... Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it." The idea is … Continue reading Availability Cascades
For me, one of the easiest examples of heuristics that Daniel Kahneman shares in his book Thinking Fast and Slow is the affect heuristic. It is a bias that I know I fall into all the time, and that has led me to buy particular brands of shoes, has influenced how I think about certain … Continue reading More on Affect Heuristics
Our experiences and narratives are extremely important to consider when we make judgments about the world, however we rarely think deeply about the reasons why we hold the beliefs we do. We rarely pause to consider whether our opinions are biased, whether our limited set of experiences shape the narratives that play in our mind, … Continue reading Fluency of Ideas
I entered a Master's in Public Administration program at the University of Nevada in 2016. I started the same semester as the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. I was drawn toward public policy because I love science, because I have always wanted to better understand how people come to hold political beliefs, and because … Continue reading Why We Talk About Human Nature
Risk is a tricky thing to think about, and how we chose to measure and communicate risk can make it even more challenging to comprehend. Our brains like to categorize things, and categorization is easiest when the categories are binary or represent three or fewer distinct possibilities. Once you start adding options and different possible … Continue reading How We Chose to Measure Risk