Daniel Kahneman
Psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics (2002), author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and with Amos Tversky the founder of the study of cognitive biases and heuristics. Died March 2024. A close friend of Annie Duke in his later years.
In the wiki
Duke devotes the opening of Annie Duke on Better Decisions, Kill Criteria, and When to Quit to him, drawing out two things she took from their friendship.
Humility about one’s own work. Where many researchers defend findings that failed to replicate, Kahneman was the first to volunteer that he wished priming were not in Thinking, Fast and Slow because it does not replicate. He said ‘I don’t know a lot’ and changed his mind readily — at one lunch, Duke realised he had spent the whole time asking about her work.
Adversarial collaboration. A method he helped invent: find someone who disagrees with you and co-design the study that would settle the dispute. His example was the money-and-happiness question — the Kahneman–Deaton finding that happiness plateaus around $75,000 (2010), later challenged by Matthew Killingsworth’s result that happiness keeps rising with income, after which Kahneman joined forces with Killingsworth and Barb Mellers to reconcile the two rather than defend his prior.
Duke also cites his hiring research — moving from unstructured judgment (‘I know a great hire when I see one’) to a structured rubric used before intuition lifted hit rate from roughly 50% to 65% — as the empirical anchor for her ‘make the implicit explicit’ argument. His aphorism ‘nothing is as important as it seems when you’re thinking about it’ underlies her mental-time-travel tool.