评论
打印
Winners of the Nobel prize in economics tend to sprinkle their papers with equations. Daniel Kahneman, who died on March 27th, populated his best-known work with characters and conundrums.
诺贝尔经济学奖得主往往会在论文中加入许多方程式。于今年3月27日去世的丹尼尔·卡尼曼则在他最著名的作品中穿插了各种人物角色和复杂难题。
Early readers encountered a schoolchild with an IQ of 150 in a city where the average was 100.
卡尼曼作品的早期读者遇到过一个智商为150、生活在平均智商为100的城市中的小学生。
Later they pondered the unfortunate Mr Tees, who arrived at the airport 30 minutes after his flight’s scheduled departure, and must have felt even worse when he discovered the plane had left 25 minutes late.
之后，读者们思考了倒霉的蒂斯先生的情况，他到达机场的时间比航班预定起飞时间晚了30分钟，而当他发现飞机实际起飞时间晚了25分钟时，他肯定感觉更糟心了。
In the 1970s readers had to evaluate ways to fight a disease that threatened to kill 600 people. In 1983 they were asked to guess the job of Linda, an outspoken, single 31-year-old philosophy graduate.
在20世纪70年代，读者们不得不评估抗击疾病的各种方法，这种疾病可能导致600人死亡。1983年，读者们被要求猜一猜测琳达做什么工作，琳达是一位31岁、性格直率、单身的哲学专业毕业生。
Kahneman used such vignettes to expose the seductive mental shortcuts that can warp people’s thoughts and decisions. Many people, for example, think it more likely that Linda is a feminist bank-teller than a bank-teller of any kind.
卡尼曼用这样的小故事揭露了那些诱人前往，但也可能会扭曲人们的想法和决定的心理捷径。例如，许多人认为琳达更有可能是一名女权主义银行出纳员，而不是其他任意类型的银行出纳员。
Presented with two responses to the disease, most choose one that saves 200 people for certain, over a chancier alternative that has a one-third chance of saving everyone and a two-thirds chance of saving no one.
当有两种应对疾病的方法摆在面前时，大多数人选择了肯定可以拯救200人的方法，而不是风险更大的另一种方法，这种方法有三分之一的概率可以拯救所有人，三分之二的概率无法拯救任何人。
But if the choice is reframed, the decision is often different. Choose the first option, after all, and 400 people die for sure. Choose the second and nobody dies with a one-third probability.
但如果把两种选择换个说法，人们的决定往往会有所不同。毕竟，选择第一种，肯定会有400人死亡。选择第二种，有三分之一的概率没有人会死亡。
Teasing questions came easily to Kahneman, even in his sleep, according to “The Undoing Project”, a book by Michael Lewis.
根据迈克尔·刘易斯的书《思维的发现》，一些引人思考的问题很容易出现在卡尼曼的头脑中，即使在他睡觉的时候。
Some sprang from his teaching, which was not confined to ivory towers. He once explained the idea of “regression to the mean” to flight instructors in Israel’s air force.
一些问题源自他的教学，并不局限于象牙塔。他曾向以色列空军的飞行教官解释过“回归均值”概念。
The reason pilots tended to improve after a sloppy manoeuvre was not because the instructor screamed at them, but because the chances of an improvement are higher if the prior performance was unusually bad.
飞行员在一次马虎操作之后往往会表现进步，这不是因为教官大声训斥了他们，而是因为如果之前的表现异常糟糕，那么进步的概率就会更高。
One of his early hit papers exposed the kind of methodological muddles to which he himself was vulnerable, such as the misplaced confidence that an outlier, like a child with an IQ of 150, would not skew even a small sample.
他早期的一篇著名论文揭示了他自己也很容易犯的一种方法论谬误，比如错误地相信一个异常数据，比如（前面提到的）智商为150的孩子，不会影响哪怕是小样本的准确性。
Kahneman also had a lifelong—and life-preserving—interest in gossip. His childhood, as the son of Lithuanian Jews living a comfortable but edgy pre-war existence in Paris, was full of talk about other people, he once wrote.
卡尼曼对八卦有一种贯穿生命始终——而且保护生命安全——的兴趣。他曾写道，作为立陶宛犹太人的儿子，他在二战前的巴黎过着舒适但令人紧张不安的生活，他的童年充满了关于其他人的议论。
Jews in Europe had to “assess others, all the time,” a friend of his told Mr Lewis. “Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous?…People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.”
卡尼曼的一位朋友告诉刘易斯，在欧洲的犹太人必须“时时刻刻对他人进行估量”。“谁很危险？谁不危险？...…人们基本上依赖着自己对他人的心理判断而生活。”
