Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman

They’d found decision analysis promising but ultimately futile. They went back and forth on writing a general interest book about the various ways the human mind deals with uncertainty; for some reason, they could never get beyond a sketchy outline and false starts of a few chapters. After the Yom Kippur war—and the ensuing collapse of the public’s

In the face of the unexpected, the range of available analogies helped determine who learned something new. In the lone lab that did not make any new findings during Dunbar’s project, everyone had similar and highly specialized backgrounds, and analogies were almost never used. “When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at thei

As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before. (Think about the lab with only E. coli specialists from chapter 5.) If those fail, they’re stuck. For the most intractable problems, “our research shows that a domain-b

If the affected parties have any political influence, however, potential losers will be more active and determined than potential winners; the outcome will be biased in their favor and inevitably more expensive and less effective than initially planned.

What has also become obvious on repeated occasions is that, when there is inquiry and advocacy, creative outcomes are much more likely. In a sense, when two people operate in pure advocacy, the outcomes are predetermined. Either person A will win, or person B will win, or more likely both will simply retain their views. When there is inquiry and ad

En 2009, Kahneman et Klein ont, ce qui n’est pas commun, coécrit un article dans lequel ils ont confronté leurs points de vue, pas pour le plaisir de la confrontation, mais pour trouver un terrain d’entente. Et ils l’ont trouvé. Ils sont tombés d’accord sur un point : l’expérience permet aux spécialistes de s’améliorer, mais seulement dans certains