I’ve been a booster of the Tversky-Kahneman cognitive-bias revolution since I read their article in Scientific American as a high school student. (To be honest, I’d always lazily thought of it as Tversky’s work, but Daniel Kahneman has had the good sense not to die prematurely, and to collect a Nobel memorial prize.) And I’ve greatly enjoyed Kahneman’s new popular book on his collected lessons from many decades of research on cognitive biases.
Putting that together with my longstanding contempt for the finance profession (expressed at greatest length here, but more generally listed here), I was particularly delighted to start in on the chapter titled “The Illusion of Validity”, where Kahneman lays into the self-serving illusions of finance professionals. It turns out, though, that this chapter is an intellectual trainwreck, with oversimplifications piling up on crude distortions, while the whistle of self-satisfied self-promotion shrills incessantly in the background. It’s both insufferable and so poorly reasoned that it begins to call the reliability of the rest of the book into question. Kahneman doesn’t claim to be free of the cognitive biases he analyses in others, but you might expect more self-awareness.
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Common Infirmities 