#150 — The Map of Misunderstanding (From the Archive)

**Kirby Ferguson** (0:02)
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Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. I'm Kirby Ferguson, producer here at the show.
Sam is on vacation this week, so we are reaching into the archive and bringing back one of our favorite episodes. This is Sam's conversation with the Nobel Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, who passed in 2024 It's a timeless conversation and actually one of our funnier episodes. If you've heard it before, it rewards a second listen. Sam will be back next week with a new episode. For now, enjoy The Map of Misunderstanding.

**Sam Harris** (0:57)
Okay. Well, today I'm bringing you the audio from my live event with Danny Kahneman at the Beacon Theatre in New York. This was a sold out event in a very cool old theater. I'd actually never been to the Beacon before, but it has a storied history in music and comedy. Anyway, it was a great pleasure to share the stage with Danny. Daniel Kahneman, as you may know, was an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University, and also an emeritus professor of public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for the work he did on decision-making under uncertainty with Amos Tversky. Unfortunately, Tversky died in 1996, and he was a legendary figure who would have certainly shared the Nobel Prize with Danny had he lived longer. They don't give the Nobel posthumously. In any case, I think it's uncontroversial to say that Danny has been the most influential living psychologist for many years now, but he's perhaps best known in the general public for his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of the work he did with Tversky.
Michael Lewis also recently wrote a biography of the Kahneman-Tversky collaboration. That is called The Undoing Project. Anyway, Danny and I covered a lot of ground at The Beacon. We discussed the replication crisis in science, systems one and two, which is to say automatic and unconscious cognitive processes, and more conscious and deliberative ones. We talked about the failure of intuition, even expert intuitions, the power of framing, moral illusions, anticipated regret, the asymmetry between threats and opportunities, the utility of worrying, removing obstacles to wanted behaviors, the remembering self versus the experiencing self, improving the quality of gossip, and many other topics. Anyway, Danny has a fascinating mind, and I think you'll find this a very good introduction to his thinking. Of course, if you want more, his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, also awaits you if you haven't read it.
And now I bring you Daniel Kahneman.
Well, thank you all for coming. Really an honor to be here. It's a Danny, it's a special honor to be here with you. So thank you for coming. My pleasure.
It's often said and rarely true that a guest needs no introduction. But in your case, that is virtually true. We're going to talk about your work throughout. So people will, if for the one person who doesn't know who you are, you will understand at the end of the hour. But I guess by way of introduction, I just want to ask, what is the worst thing about winning the Nobel Prize?

**Daniel Kahneman** (4:15)
That's a hard question, actually. There weren't many downsides to it. Okay.

**Sam Harris** (4:22)
Well, nobody wants to hear your problems, Dan.
So how do you think about your body of work? How do you summarize the intellectual problems you have tried to get your hands around?

**Daniel Kahneman** (4:39)
You know, it's been just a series of problems that occurred that I worked on. There was no big program. When you look back, of course, I mean, you see patterns and you see ideas that have been with you for a long time, but there was really no plan. I was, you know, you follow, you follow things, you follow ideas, you follow things that you take fancy to.
Really, that's the story of my intellectual life. It's just one thing after another.

**Sam Harris** (5:08)
Judging from the outside, it seems to me that you have told us much of what we now think we know about cognitive bias and cognitive illusion. And really, the picture is of human ignorance having a kind of structure. It's not just that we get things wrong. We get things reliably wrong. And because of that, whole groups, markets, society is going to get things wrong because the errors don't cancel themselves out. Bias becomes systematic. And that obviously has implications that touch more or less everything we care about. I want to track through your work as presented in your now famous and well-read book, Thinking Fast and Slow.