Arnold Kling sobre el nuevo libro de Kahneman

What bothers me about behavioral economists is what I might term "one-trial bias." Most of the results (not all) are from situations in which individuals are confronted with a problem that is novel for them. Often, the psychologist-experimenter engages in deception. The mistakes that individuals make may or may not be replicated in repeated situations, in circumstances where the individual is able to learn from experience, or in situations where an organizational or institutional mechanism (such as the market) may produce results that are superior to the judgment of any single individual…

As I wrote in The Era of Expert Failure, the choice we face is not between following government experts or making our own mistakes. Instead, it is a choice between following the experts who emerge in a competitive market or obeying experts who grasp the reins of power in government. Government is not the only source, or even the best source, of restraints on our propensity to make mistakes. The market provides many such mechanisms. I would rather see behavioral economists attempting to be market entrepreneurs than see them acting as policy entrepreneurs.

Two chess players, for example, may appear to be so close in terms of ability that it would seem that the outcome should be determined by luck. If you look at any one move, one player may have a 70 percent chance of making the optimal move and the other player may have a 65 percent chance. If that one move were the whole game, then the outcome would vary considerably, depending on luck. However, in a sequence of many moves, the better player's chance of coming out ahead gets to be very high. Business is like a multi-move game, in which any one decision by an inferior player can turn out right, but it is unlikely that an inferior player will make a sequence of decisions that turns out to be better than those of a superior player.

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The win or loss of a chess game may be decided in the same incremental way. Especially when good players are nearly equal in skill, the dame is seldom lost by a single bad move. Rather, the winning player secures a cumulative advantage by exploiting successive small weaknesses that are observed in the opponent’s choices of moves.”

Esta frase es de la Autobiografía de Herbert Simon, el padre de la inteligencia artificial