Daniel Kahneman: prediction

Transcript context

…Yes, sir. On this topic of delaying intuition — and I’m delighted that Mr. Klein is in the audience because I spent over a decade myself as an intuitive expert and found myself mostly using recognition-primed decision-making. I’m curious how much you think availability bias, confirmation bias, et cetera, was still affecting my recognition-primed decision-making. And is recognition-primed decision-making still useful? Or is it just the best option in a temporally constrained environment? I think, obviously, recognition-primed decision-making is going to be wonderful if people really can recognize things accurately. If they can diagnose the situation accurately and do it quickly and act intuitively on that basis, then of course it’s beneficial. And there are conditions under which this applies. Gary Klein and I became friends over a period of six years when we were trying to find out, what are the boundaries? I’m sort of a critic of intuition, and he is very much in favor of intuition, of expert intuition. And we were trying to find out, what are the boundaries? Because it’s clear that sometimes intuition is wonderful and sometimes it’s awful. We ended up with a fairly obvious set of conclusions about what it is. You’re going to have Gary Klein–type intuition, expert intuition, if you have a regular world. That’s condition number one. There are regularities that you can pick up. And if you have a lot of experience and if the feedback is rapid and unequivocal. If you have those three conditions, which are true for chess players — and they’re true for spouses recognizing the emotion of their spouse on the telephone, to give you a completely different example — then intuition will develop and it will be perfect. If those conditions do not develop, I don’t think we can trust people who say that they’re experts. Another iPad question. Tech entrepreneur Daniel Gross suggested that growing up in Israel was a forcing function for the tech sector. How much was Israel a forcing function for your thinking?…

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