Daniel Kahneman published Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011. This was my choice for the best
nonfiction book I read this year. Among the forty books I read thirteen were
nonfiction. Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for economics in
2002, writes about his research in three areas of decision-making: cognitive
bias, prospect theory, and happiness assessment.
First he
sets up an opposition in the ways the mind works to assess or decide something.
The intuitive way works quickly, without our conscious awareness, drawing on
memory. The reflective way is slower, takes conscious effort and causes bodily
signs of dilated pupils, increased heart-rate, and others. Most of our
decisions from moment to moment are made intuitively, some of them necessarily
so, like reflex action from pain or danger, but in many cases we ought to be
engaging in reflection to avoid the cognitive biases and other problems with
intuitive decision-making.
Kahneman
names several categories of heuristics
or rules for quick decision-making, and he enumerates their various pitfalls.
Among the cognitive biases which impede good decisions are these:
The Representative
Heuristic. We tend to classify
according to a narrative story rather than base rates, that is the real
probability that object or person A belongs in category B. An outstanding case
is the Linda Problem, in which respondents go for plausibility when asked about
probability (the tendency to answer a less-difficult question than the one
asked is one of the drawbacks of thinking fast). Linda is single, 32, outspoken
and bright. She majored in philosophy and as a student was deeply concerned
with issues of discrimination and social justice. When given this information
and told to rank the following scenarios in order of probability
A Linda is a
teacher is elementary school
B Linda is a bank
teller
C Linda is an
insurance salesman
D Linda is a bank
teller who is active in the feminist movement,
most respondents rank D as more likely than B, defying
logic.
Tom W’s specialty is a variation of the Linda Problem.
We tend to misconceive of the way chance works in
particular ways. Given a six-sided die with 4 green and 2 red faces, rank in
order of probability these sequences coming up:
A RGRRR
B GRGRRR
C GRRRRR
As in the Linda Problem, most respondents will say B is
more likely than A, even though there are two possibilities for a previous
throw in A and thus it is more likely.
Regression to the
mean tends to confirm people’s mistaken notion that punishment works better
than praise; Kahneman quotes an Israeli pilot instructor who says “when I
praise someone for an exceptionally good performance, he almost always does
worse the next time, but when I chew out someone for a bad job, he always does
better the next time.”
Insensitivity to
sample size means people are not
aware that they will get results at either extreme from small samples.
The Availability
Heuristic. Large classes are recalled faster than instances of less
frequent classes, likely occurrences imagined more easily than unlikely ones,
and associative connections between events stronger when they often occur
together. But the availability heuristic results in frequent, systematic
errors.
The Anchoring
Heuristic. Any number mentioned in the initial request to estimate an
unknown quantity or range will affect the resulting guess, however impossibly
small or large the number is.
There are other sources of error aside from heuristics.
Overconfidence.
Research suggests that clinical evaluations by professionals are not as
reliable in predicting certain kinds of outcomes (violations of parole,
recidivism, longevity of cancer patients, credit risks, the future price of a
wine vintage) as formulas, that is, algorithms that equally weigh a few obvious
predictors (such as Ashenfelter’s formula for wine vintage value that uses
total winter rainfall, rainfall at harvest, and average temperature over the
summer growing season).
WYSIATI—The
intuitive mind tends to accept presented facts as all it needs (What You
See Is All There
Is), where reflection would convince us that there are some things or numbers
we don’t know that would be relevant to a decision (Known Unknowns). Further
reflection would suggest that there might be facts relevant to a decision that
we don’t know are relevant (Unknown Unknowns).
We tend to see more order in the world than is really
there. We tend to think ourselves more in control than we really are, and less
subject to chance (optimistic bias) The optimistic boas lessens loss aversion—the tendency to fear
losses more than we value gains. Framing works on loss aversion: more
people will choose surgery if told that there is a 90% survival rate than if
told that there is a 10% mortality rate. To avoid feelings of regret, people
tend to continue investing in losing prospects—sunk costs.
The planning fallacy—the tendency to
overestimate gains and underestimate losses—is an example of the optimistic
bias.
In Prospect Theory, Kahneman found that expected utility theory, the accepted notion, did not account for
the relative wealth of the person who chooses risk, but that real
decision-making does. He proposes the fourfold
pattern of risk attitudes. We become risk averse when there is a high
probability of a large gain. We become risk seeking when there is a high
probability of a large loss. We become risk seeking when there is a low
probability but a chance for large gains. We become risk averse when there is a
low probability for large losses.
Rationality and Happiness—Kahneman’s
research found that in remembering an experience, we rate its pleasure or pain
on the peak or valley of the experience plus its ending, with no concern for
duration. Moreover, the remembering self rather than the experiencing self gets
the last word.
Altogether,
Kahneman’s work seems to indicate we don’t make decisions very well most of the
time, and that we are not especially self-aware in any of our thinking about
thinking.
My fiction
choice is Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor:
A Family Chronicle, written in 1969; this was a reread of a book I probably
first read in the seventies or eighties. It is a book with lots of natural
history—mostly botany and hemiptery, with a little of Nabokov’s expert
lepidoptery. A fair amount of untranslated Russian and French is made more
comprehensible because of Nabokov’s style, containing many catalogues,
repetition with variation, and multilingual glosses. And like all of Nabokov,
the Word is apotheosized: “Thank Log!” is a frequent expression of Van Veen,
the protagonist and, as we gradually discover, the memoirist writing his own
history in the third person.
The book ends with its own blurb,
and near the end is a dissertation upon time, in which Professor of Psychology
Van Veen denies that the future has any part in the concept of time and which
is an expression of Van’s lifelong denial of death. The book may be seen, as
indeed may many novels—Austen’s romances come to mind—as a wish-fulfillment
fantasy. It is an alternate-geography, alternate-history, alternate-planet
story that takes place on Antiterra or Demonia. Terra, on the other hand, is a
planet accessible only through the hallucinations of Van’s mentally-disturbed
patients, but it is the world whose geography and history is that of our own
world—the readers’ reality. Another way to look at the world map of the book,
with Russia located in North America and Russian, French, and English all
likely languages to be heard within any group of Americans, is that it reflects
somehow the mental geography of Nabokov himself.
Fourteen-year-old Van Veen—Ivan
Dementievich Veen, whose father is most often referred to as Demon Veen—visits
Ardis, the country house of his aunt Marina. There he and his cousin,
twelve-year-old Ada, begin an affair that lasts for more than eighty years. The
two children soon discover diaries, letters, and other documents in the attic
of Ardis from which they quickly and correctly infer—both have intelligence off
the IQ chart, which contributes to their mutual attraction—that Marina is in
fact the mother and Demon the father of both of them. Far from deterring their
affair, the discovery becomes another secret link bonding them.
Their tryst is interrupted when Van
must return to school, and it is not resumed until four years later. Another
blissful summer interlude ends when Van discovers Ada has been unfaithful. He
goes off to murder her two lovers, but is prevented by a silly duel in which he
is injured and by the death of both of the objects of his wrath, one by his
wife’s poison precipitating the fatal effects of disease, the other in an
Antiterran version of a protracted Crimean War.
Van and Ada are reunited briefly after a
hiatus of five years, but when Demon Veen discovers their affair, he convinces
Van to stay away from Ada so that she may have something like a normal, happy
life. Ada marries, and she and Van are separated for some years. This period of
reunion and separation is complicated by the presence of Ada’s younger sister
Lucette, who spied on their lovemaking when they were all children, who loves
Van while she also has an intimate sexual relationship with Ada, and who kills
herself by leaping from an ocean liner after her last unsuccessful attempt to
seduce Van.
The lovers are again briefly
reunited in their thirties in Switzerland, an idyll that ends when Ada’s
husband Andrey Vinelander has an attack of “psychopathic pseudobronchitis”
which may or may not have turned into tuberculosis. In any case it does not
kill Andrey, who returns to Arizona, taking Ada with him, and lives on for
another seventeen years. A few months after his death Ada joins Van, again in
Switzerland, and they live the remainder of their long lives together: he is
ninety-seven as he writes the memoir called Ada
or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, which Ada annotates as he writes.
When I wrote that the novel is a
wish-fulfillment fantasy I meant that it embodies what I regard as a
particularly Nabokovian notion about true love involving the denial of
convention and the embracing of the forbidden, a complication that ensures its
being impossible to sustain. This notion may be seen at its most extreme in
Lolita’s paean to the perverse. For Ada and Van, everyone (except perhaps
Lucette) is too dim to see that their love trumps any disgust, horror, or moral
opprobrium attaching to incest.
I read Hart Crane’s
Complete Poems in the 1958
Anchor Book edition introduced by Waldo Frank. Although I had read Crane
before, this was my first exposure to all the poems.
Crane’s
voice is a completely unique one in American poetry. He has rigorous formal
control, often with rhyme, that scarcely seems to contain the near frenzy of
the lines as they range across history, juxtaposing the most disparate
elements. It reminds me of a native dance fueled by peyote or other
hallucinogens, where the mannered, stylized patterns of movement threaten to
break apart into manic violence. But Crane’s singularity does not mean, as
Frank points out in his introduction, that he was not solidly in the tradition of
Whitman, whom he invokes in “Cape Hatteras.” The invocation almost turns into a
conversation, with Crane as much as asking “what would you have thought of the
airplane, Walt?” This is part of The Bridge (1930) which makes up about a
third of Crane’s total poetry. Although White
Buildings was published first, in 1926, Frank puts The Bridge first in this book..
“Proem:
To Brooklyn Bridge” describes Crane’s view of the bridge by dawn, noon, and night, from below and presumably from the
room he lived in overlooking the bridge; the “bedlamite” suicide who leaps from
the bridge, and the Statue of Liberty visible from the Brooklyn side. The gull
“chill from his rippling rest” is the first of a number of lines that remind me
of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In “Ave Maria”
Columbus invokes the men who helped him by interceding with Queen Isabella and
pronounces an exultant Te Deum for what he thinks is a successful voyage to the
Orient: “I bring you back Cathay!”
“Powhatan’s Daughter,” “Van Winkle” and other
poems from the middle of The Bridge
take us through real and imagined American history, all reimagined within sight
of the Brooklyn Bridge. In “Cape Hatteras,” starting from Kitty Hawk, Crane
juxtaposes the mechanical and industrial world with the atomic and the cosmic
view, invoking Whitman, with little echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins in some
lines: “Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;/Warping the gale, the
Wright windwrestlers veered/Capeward, then blading the wind’s flank, banked and
spun….” Somehow all this seems to lead to war, and we have both Walt’s war and
Hart’s war, “from Appomattox stretched to Somme!” “The Tunnel,” the
next-to-last poem, is a descent by subway into the tunnel beneath the East
River, a kind of descent into the underworld with echoes of The Waste Land in overheard conversation
snatches and putting another record on the gramophone; someone suggests Crane
sees himself as answering The Waste Land
with a poem about the promise of the New World, and in the last poem,
“Atlantis,” the cables of the bridge become musical strings in a song where
Atlantis is seen as some sort of continental bridge between the Old and New
Worlds.
In White Buildings Crane tries on various
personae for the poet in “Chaplinesque” and “Lachrymae Christi,” updates the
Faust legend in “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” eulogizes Melville in
“At Melville’s Tomb,” and writes a multi-part poem about love in “Voyages.”
In
addition to some early poems Crane never reprinted and an essay, “Modern
Poetry,” a section of “Uncollected Poems” contains “Eternity,” describing the
aftermath of a hurricane that hit the Isle of Pines while Crane was visiting
his family’s property there in 1926.
Until
the last few years, I have not spent a lot of time reading poetry in the Whitman
tradition, or Whitman himself. The fact that my older son and his love are
scholars of Whitman and important people in the Whitman Digital Archive has
changed my attitude not only about Whitman, but about his literary heirs, of
whom Crane is clearly one.
