Daniel Kahneman: Lessons & Critiques

Daniel Kahneman, credited as a grandfather of behavioral economics, passed away in March, and we devote this episode to an unfiltered discussion of his legacy through a product lens.

KAHNEMAN’S LEGACY: THE BULL CASE – 01:55
NY Times obituary of Daniel Kahneman

KAHNEMAN’S LEGACY: THE BEAR CASE – 03:40
The “Nudge” of the Obama Era Was Always Neoliberal Nonsense
Nudge economics: has push come to shove for a fashionable theory?

JOACHIM’S PERSPECTIVE – 05:27
A Quick Excursion into Behavioral Economics

ERNEST’S PERSPECTIVE – 10:56
Netflix to stop reporting subscriber numbers
Pronation in runners. Implications for injuries
There’s a New Way to Choose the Right Running Shoe
Nobel Prize winner admits mistakes

RELEVANCE FOR PRODUCT CREATION – 19:43
Decision Support System

GAMING AS A MODEL – 21:57

INDIE CONTENT CREATORS AS A MODEL – 23:15
Beyond the Trailer
On the Success of Xiaomi

DON’T PATRONIZE YOUR CUSTOMER – 27:11
Edward Tufte
Pop Culture Pulsar
1010music Blackbox
Elektron Octatrack
8-bit processor built in Minecraft

KAHNEMAN ON CHANGING HIS MIND – 39:16
Remembering Daniel Kahneman

WEEKLY RECS – 42:27
If Books Could Kill
Masuda Kiribako Rice Bin
Kiyosi Seike: The Art of Japanese Joinery
The Joinery on X

CLOSING & PREVIEW – 50:43

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Rant, rave or otherwise via email at LearnMakeLearn@gmail.com or on Threads @LearnMakeLearnShow.

CREDITS
Theme: Vendla / Today Is a Good Day / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Drum hit: PREL / Musical Element 85 / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com

Chapters

• 1:55 Kahneman’s Legacy: The Bull Case
• 3:40 Kahneman’s Legacy: The Bear Case
• 5:27 Joachim’s Perspective
• 10:56 Ernest’s Perspective
• 19:43 Relevance for Product Creation
• 21:57 Gaming as a Model
• 23:15 Indie Content as a Model
• 27:11 Don’t Patronize Your Customers
• 39:16 Kahneman on Changing His Mind
• 42:27 Weekly Recommendations
• 50:43 Closing & Preview of Our Next Episode

Transcript

Ernest: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Learn Make Learn, where we share qualitative and quantitative perspectives on products to help you make better. My name is Ernest Kim and I'm joined by my friend and co host Joachim Groeger. Hey Joachim, how's it going?

Joachim: 0:18

Very good. It's, sunny in Seattle, so I'm not going to complain. It's good times and good weather up here. Is it the same, in Portland right now?

Ernest: 0:26

Oh yeah, same, it's been fantastic and uh,, looks like it is gonna be like this for at least a couple more days, so uh,, we're really looking forward to making the most of it.

Joachim: 0:37

I think because the weather is so changeable, I just try and not look at the forecast and I live in the moment and enjoy the sun while it's there and not worry about what comes next. So I don't know what's going to happen in the next few days in Seattle. Fingers crossed.

Ernest: 0:51

I like that approach, I think that's a good idea.

Joachim: 0:54

Yeah.

Ernest: 0:55

Okay. Well, this is episode 15. And today our topic is Daniel Kahneman, who passed away this past March at the age of 90. Kahneman was a psychologist by training, but along with his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, Kahneman would make significant contributions to the field of economics. In fact, Tversky and Kahneman came to be known as the grandfathers of behavioral economics and Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002. We'll dive into the influences that Kahneman's ideas have had on product design and product thinking in just a minute, but let's start with some context for folks who might not be familiar with Kahneman or his work. As I mentioned a minute ago, Daniel Kahneman, who recently passed away at the age of 90, was a psychologist who became a hugely important figure in economics. And, along with his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, established the foundations for what would become the field of behavioral economics. To very quickly summarize Kahneman's impact, I'll quote from the New York Times obituary for Kahneman, written by Robert D. Hershey, Jr. Hershey wrote, quote, As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways, and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral economics school is based on exposing hard wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results. Before Kahneman and Tversky, People who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2011, they assume that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assume that people are basically sensible utility maximizers and that when they depart from reason, it's because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment. But professors Kahneman and Tversky, he went on yielded a different version, a different vision As Mr. Brooks described it, we are players in a game that we don't understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. He added our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought. work of Professor Kahneman and Professor Fiske, he concluded will be, remember remembered hundreds of years from now. So I guess you could say this is the bull case for the legacy of Kahneman's work, but the praise is by no means universal. In the show notes to last week's episode on design thinking, I included a link to a piece from Jacobin magazine, which describes itself as a leading voice of the American left. That piece by Lisa Featherstone absolutely skewered one of the most visible applications of Kahneman's work. Featherstone wrote, Quote, behavioral economics major insight was that people often don't act rationally, contrary to the assumptions of neoclassical economics. For upper middle class audiences, and more importantly, elite policymakers, that was a compelling revelation. You see, the main problem in economic life wasn't exploitation or plutocracy. No, the real issue was that people are idiots. The piece continues, behavioral economics was one of the intellectual foundations of the Obama administration, and the administration was enamored by the power of the nudge, the field's term for the policy tweaks that can adjust behavior for the better, whether saving for retirement or stopping smoking. The nudge was beloved by the Obama administration because of the nudge. While its bright young nerds were committed to a message of progress, they were so fully owned by the rich donor class and big capital that real progress on most problems would have been impossible. Enter behavioral economics. Skipping ahead to Featherston's conclusion now, she wrote, The behavioral science moment seems quaint now, partly because of the widespread acknowledgement that so much more is at stake in policy arguments than our individual muddled decision making. And partly because we know that the nation's most important problems, from inflation and the climate crisis to low wages and the threat of the far right, are too big for petty TED talk trickery. If you listened to our last episode, you'll recognize this as being of a piece with Joachim's critiques of design thinking and its emphasis on the personal over the systemic. All right, so was David Brooks right in saying that Kahneman's work will be remembered hundreds of years from now? Or echoing Lisa Featherstone's piece, was Tim Adams at the Guardian on the right track when he observed that Though nudge economics remains seductive, what once seemed like a panacea has become, uh, has come to look a bit more like a series of sticking plasters. All right, so with all that set up out of the way, Yochim, I'm dying to hear what you think and what your perspective is on this.

Joachim: 6:09

So I, I think the, the short version of this is if you want to be really, really critical about this whole thing, you could just say, okay, the essence of what Kahneman and Tversky figured out is people make mistakes and they are error prone. So what? Right? Big deal. People make mistakes. And children make mistakes. And when they make arithmetic mistakes, we just tell them, you made a mistake. You need to learn arithmetic properly. Right? So that's our approach there. We don't say to children, Oh, you made a mistake. I'm going to rewrite the rules of arithmetic so that what it is that you got wrong will be correct under these new rules of arithmetic. The notion that humans are error prone is by itself not such a powerful idea. The appeal from these ideas is that they're very straightforward to understand. You can summarize them As the Jacobin piece pointed out, in this type of TED talky way, right, Little tiny fixes will add up to make a huge difference and everything is okay. And you need not go into your political camps and your ideologies, right, as there's trying to be ideology free, maybe it was the goal. So if everything is ideology free. Everything is just about science and figuring things out. You would hope that the science that Kahneman and Tversky were engaged in was solid. But when you look at that paper from the early 70s. The whole foundations of this is from an experiment that involves about 72 people. That's not scientific enough, right? Skip 20 years into the future. There are two papers that come out in Econometrica, which is the premier journal in economics. And these two papers basically test the theory again. from Kahneman and Tversky, they basically show that all theories are terrible, including the Kahneman and Tversky framework. None of these things perform well. The theory that performs the least worst is the traditional rational decision framework that we had before. So from a pure scientific perspective, small sample size, small studies, anecdata as opposed to data, and then proper data, proper analysis, highlighting that really the traditional theory doesn't do so badly. Everything's terrible because human beings are very complicated objects, but,, it's the least worst theory. That's a paper from 1994. Kahneman's mainstream success comes in 2010, uh, with his book and the nudge theory and all these things are coming a little bit around 2000s. No one mentions that we've basically put to rest the question of whether these theories are good. So there's a bit of a dis a little bit of intellectual dishonesty as well that we're not representing accurately what this theory is actually doing. But as I was thinking through this and thinking about all these intellectual details, I realized that that stuff doesn't matter. What matters is kind of the TED talk that survived, right? The essence of the TED Talk idea permeates people's minds. They don't even read the book anymore. They just need the one Like we talked about last time with design thinking, all that remains are the sticky post it notes, but none of the other bits that matter. So I think maybe we should be looking at the legacy of this work really through the lens of What's left over and what do people remember and how does that influence decision making and again, back to our favorite topic? How does that influence how we view our customers when we are thinking about product? What is it that a product person will then decide for their customer? They will say to them, you don't get choice. You shouldn't have agency because you're so bad. So let me just decide for you. And I think that's a really bad and slippery slope But I really think When it comes time to design a product, you're going to try your best to take away control from those people, because they are, in your perception, not very clever. And we, again, it's alluding back to our discussion about design thinking, the human centric design thinking. I think this behavioral stuff also fed into that because it was saying, you know, simplify the journey, make it slick, don't complicate stuff, remove the frictions, get rid of the complexity, blah, blah. Yeah. But what you're actually doing is removing agency from the customer, and they won't be able to interact with the product in a meaningful way. I think like Netflix is a great example of that, right? We don't trust you. We'll do it for you. In fact, You don't have to even see a screen, just shuffle, just hit that shuffle button. I don't remember if you were exposed to that feature on Netflix, but it was just pick for me as a shuffle button that you could click before you even went into your profile. They would just grab a piece of content for you. And then that was it. Anyway, I would like to open this up because it's very much, I'm just right now stuck in my perspective and I've, I know how I feel about behavioral. So I'm interested really. Where were you coming from with this whole topic? Because actually, I didn't pick this topic. I bet someone thought, Oh, economists are on the podcast, so they'll pick something. You can't think. didn't pick it. Ernest, you picked this. So I'm happy to also follow you on the journey that you wanted to take us on.

Ernest: 11:21

Oh, no, no, I appreciate it. But I love having your perspective on this. Um, on my end, I would say that I was very seduced by these ideas. Um, not having had, uh, I took econ in high school and I was about it. I enjoyed it, but, you know, definitely my exposure to it has not been, uh, in any, to any depth. And. I think as someone who was very engaged in experience design, um, in the early stages of my career, These sorts of ideas were very enticing to me. And so, with those early days of Ted and Malcolm Gladwell, and then getting exposed to behavioral economics, it was very exciting to see that, oh, there was this field that, um, had this veneer of rigor around it, uh, that seemed to be, um, reinforcing some of these ideas that, um, I was seeing in my day to day Life in experience design. So. You know, I'd say that was my background and that was my introduction to this world, was as a very, um, willing, participant, someone who, you know, really just kind of lapped this stuff up. And it's only recently that, I've started to think about it more critically, I guess. And And part of it was based on the lack of results, you know, the sorts of things that you highlighted last week in the context of design thinking, and then that the Jacobin piece talked about in the context of, you know, this nudge approach, which was applied in not just in the Obama administration and, uh, governments around the world to, you know, I think now we could say very little effect. so, it's something that I think Kahneman's passing created this opportunity to just kind of investigate that a little bit more and, uh, dig into that and maybe help people who are making products, to avoid some of the pitfalls, that they might, fall into, if they weren't to think more critically about this, I think the example, you cited was really interesting. And I think And so, you know, I think that was also part of this period we've been in of just seeking hypergrowth. Um, and, uh, you know, that being the thing that you're rewarded for and is interesting in that Netflix in their most recent quarterly earnings call, which happened, I think just a week or two ago, uh, noted that they're no longer going to share subscriber numbers. And instead they're going to report hours watched. And it's because they've said that, you know, that's a better metric. And that is tied to the shift in their business strategy to now incorporate a free ad supported tier. So it's actually true that, in the context of an ad supported platform, hours watched is more important. so I, I, I'm going to be really interested to see that with this shift, if they do start to adopt a more systemic approach that does give you the viewer more agency so that they're able to keep you on the platform longer versus just, Punching out new stuff constantly and highlighting just that new thing just to get the subscriber numbers up. So I think that is one great example of how these ideas can play out in a very concrete way and product and the way product comes to life. Another example that comes to mind for me is in the running shoe world. there's a very similar sort of, phenomenon in that world in that a very, charismatic scientist, a guy named Benno Nigg, who was, I'd say, to my, experience, the most influential biomechanist of his age. I think he was out of, University of Calgary, but he was the first to really introduce the idea that, something called overpronation was the cause of the majority of running related injuries and it was all based on analogy like looking at physical models and then Using those to reason that okay If you if the body were to overpronate then it could cause all these other running related injuries we're seeing and so The industry really latched onto this idea. So, you know,, very similar to the idea that we're all stupid and, we have to be told what to do. So the assumption here was that we're all essentially broken. We all have this over, almost all of us have this overpronation issue. And so we need footwear products to, to fix that basically to address this inherent flaw that we all have. And. And for decades, that was the accepted wisdom in the running shoe industry that pretty much everyone needed a shoe that offered some amount of pronation control. And it led to shoes that had this very blocky sort of harder material on the arch side of the shoe. And, um, the experience of running in those shoes was not great. And yet, because we were all told that we needed them, many of us did actually run in those types of shoes. But people started to notice a couple of decades in that, Hey, actually, the, incidents of running related injuries hasn't decreased at all. So, um,, what's going on here? I thought these shoes were supposed to help reduce this risk of running related injury. And to his credit, Benno Nigg, really came around and completely flipped his perspective and His last, um, speech as a biomechanist at this, uh, big event, which was not that long ago, uh, it was kind of his valedictory speech. He acknowledged that he was wrong and he instead, put all of his weight behind this new concept that he called the preferred motion path, but essentially that the body knows what it wants to do. And so the role of products, including footwear should be to just enable the body to do what it wants to do. So completely the opposite: from, we're all inherently broken to, we actually, all our bodies know exactly what we need. So we need to just get out of the way and, give that agency back to our bodies. So, I think the, the sort of thing might seem esoteric, but. You can see that it absolutely, these sorts of ideas do influence products and product creation. So, I love that we're having this opportunity to talk about it, but I guess that's my, my, my way into it is just, recognizing my own, um, gullibility, I guess, of just accepting this without really looking at the evidence and whether there was any valid evidence, just because it happened to align with my own understanding. Kind of assumptions, much like the Jacobin piece talked about, um, and then coming to realize that this sort of approach, this sort of kind of blanket approach can be really dangerous and lead to negative outcomes. but it's pretty remarkable to see how seductive these kinds of ideas can be. this nudge idea was adopted by governments around the world. Um, the whole overpronation, concept was embraced by the whole of the running footwear industry for decades. So, um, I think maybe the warning and the cautionary tale here is to, to just be willing to push back against accepted wisdom, uh, even if it comes from a Nobel prize winning academic. And that Kahneman, his willingness to question himself. Um, I think you had highlighted this in one of our early episodes, um, of reference to an article about Kahneman, citing some of the, the problems with his earlier research and being very open about that. So I think, that's really laudable. And. He's talked about that a lot, the importance of being willing to change your mind. So I think there's to a degree, the, the broader world has kind of run amok a little bit with these ideas that he introduced to a degree beyond what, I think maybe he himself would have advocated for. But, uh, I was just curious if you have any other takeaways that you see that might be relevant to people who are making products.

Joachim: 19:52

Yeah I think People are limited in their cognitive abilities, obviously, we can't compute everything, if there is, data that we can use and information and models and more disciplined thinking and connecting ourselves to an mathematically, internally consistent framework, let's build that framework and then let's use it. So it just means that you have to think about ways to help them get it. you have to build a tooling that lets them do that stuff. and I think in the product innovation arena, since we've been talking about running Apple fitness, it's retrospective, right? I've burnt this many calories. My time was this much. I stood that long. That doesn't really help me. Navigate the complex decision of good diet, movement, if I skip a workout today, what happens to me, what are the consequences of my choices? It's very backward looking. Like all metrics are. It's just, you did that. Well done. Not you did these things and that sets you up for this future path.

Ernest: 20:49

Right.

Joachim: 20:50

and that's, decision support, right? It's telling you where we're heading as opposed to where we've been. I know I've just done a 5k run. Great. I know I did a weight training. Brilliant. I know this. What happens if I don't do what if I'm tired today? And when should I If I want to take a break, or if I got a cold, when can I realistically get back on and be, not lose fitness or something, we just get these numbers and, no offense to whoop whoop did a similar thing with the sleep cycle and stuff. It's just these numbers that people give you as a score. You're not giving the agency back to the user. You're just saying we've got all these cool signals. We've got stuff happening in the background and we'll give you a single number that is supposed to capture everything like that's really dishonest and disrespectful to the customer at the end of the day. Same thing with Netflix, right? The recommendations are just like washing out my voice. As a customer, all I can do as a customer right in the subscription paradigm is subscribe or not subscribe. That's my voice. That's the only time you get to really hear me. I have no voice and it's very sad. Right, I think, sorry, I'm going to do a quick tangent. I think video games have always had this the right way around. They use the game to teach you new things as you go through the game. Obviously, typical first person shooter is pretty straightforward, but anything a little bit more complex that involves some knowledge and some forethought, they design the levels to, increase the difficulty and allow you to try new things and learn new tricks. That's respectful of the user journey, right? Right? They are putting just the right amount of difficulty, but they're also going to explain it to you. They're not going to expect you to understand from the get go that you can do these crazy things. No, they build you up to that point because they understand. There is cognitive load, but we still want to get you to that level to finish the game, and we're going to make it difficult and a little bit frustrating. I mean, you do have to teach your customers sometimes. I don't know why we're so scared of that, but that's what behavioral economics teaches you, right? I think. If like my arithmetic example at the beginning is kids have to be taught how to do arithmetic. You have to be told how to save money. You know, you have to be taught how to do lots of things and that's wonderful. We should be finding more creative ways to get that into the product journey so that people can actually get up to a higher level and enjoy something on a deeper level. Right?

Ernest: 23:13

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned, games to me, the one example that comes to mind, where I see this happening today is in independent content creators and particularly video content creators. where they very much engage with their audiences. So they're getting lots of rich signal back and actually acting on it. And they, I think, a lot of them do such a great job of teaching, teaching how this system works and creating a culture around, this environment where it's highly dynamic, um, and constantly evolving. One example that comes to mind. I think her name is Grace Randolph. She runs a YouTube channel called beyond the trailer. I believe, uh, we'll include a link in the show notes, but, she, focuses on content related to the entertainment industry. And she does every week. I think she does this, live stream and, You can, uh, participate, not only watch, but you can submit questions and she does polls. And I'm amazed at her ability to manage this, incredibly dynamic environment because you know, she's talking about a topic, but then if somebody comes into the chat, she'll say hello to them and then go, go right back into what she was talking about. And then there's a system that now, YouTube supports where you can, um, subscribe to her stream, you could, send money to the creator, but you could also, uh, in the case of her stream, provide free subscriptions or, forget what the actual verbiage is, but so if somebody gifts a subscription, she'll shout them out in the midst of, whatever she's talking about. And it's really remarkable her ability to manage this, you know, what would be the seemingly incredible cognitive load, but I think it's because she. grew into it. Um, and I think it shows you that this sort of environment is, is achievable, this sort of interaction and relationship between creator and not just consumer, but participant is possible. I will say, I haven't. I can't think off the top of my head of any good examples of companies that have managed to do this in the physical product space. The closest that comes to mind is the Chinese company Xiaomi, and I don't believe they do this anymore, but for a time they, um, had this program in China where You could essentially buy in to be a beta tester of physical products. And that would give you, um, the ability to provide feedback. And I, I think they might've even said, you know, like within X period, we're going to roll out a new version of this product. And they would show how they actually did incorporate feedback from there. audience, their buyers, uh, into that next version of the product. So it was a clear, um, path between, your interaction, your experiences, and the next version, the next incarnation of this thing. Um, I don't think they had any. innovative business models around that, that made that more sustainable than you just have to buy a new product every X months. But, at least it was the start of something. And at least from what I had heard, the engagement from the customers was very, very high. And that was one of the things that really differentiated Xiaomi in a very highly competitive market segment. They were in consumer electronics, so, you know, no great examples yet. But I think we're in these sort of adjacent spaces like gaming and content creation, starting to see some blueprints of what might be possible in, um, kind of Treating this relationship with your audience differently, not just thinking they're all idiots and oversimplifying your offering to actually engaging with them in a

Joachim: 27:11

Yeah, maybe that's the theme that's coming out of all of this conversation is that you don't have to patronize your customer. And in fact, if you do that, you're going to miss out on deeper connection with them and learning more from them and meeting them where they are. And if you want to meet your customers and respect them, that's going to take a lot more effort. And so one of the areas I was thinking about that has been, in my opinion, stalling a bit is data visualization. Data visualization is one of those areas that is a really, really important, um, way of communicating. Complex information using visual language, and human eyes are really good at processing a lot of that information. So, uh, might've referenced him before everyone likes to reference him for data visualization. it's Edward Tufte. He wrote various books on visual display of quantitative information, envisioning information, and so on. Uh, in one of his latter books, we'll try and find. The link that we can share, but he shows, a Shinkansen set schedule. So the Japanese bullet train schedule that has time and geography on the same map. It is incredibly dense, but it contains so much information that is easily consumable at an, at a glimpse. And human beings are incredibly good at that. Now we know people fall for optical illusions and so on. So you have to really design these things from the ground up to be usable with the biases that we have in our mind, right? Our inability to measure things with our eyes, right? It's not exactly accurate. So we have to think about that. And I think that's probably the biggest barrier in this whole thing is that it takes a lot of cognitive effort to design something so that you can transmit. So much information quickly, succinctly, and in a way that is immediately legible to a human being, uh, and so that my bad example is Tableau. I think Tableau is, they are a software as a service. platform. I'm sure some of our listeners have encountered it, but it's basically ways of plotting pictures of the underlying data very, very easily. Um, and that graphs are just so lame, bar charts, pie charts, line charts. I mean, it's Excel, but, running on the cloud using your big data. I haven't seen any creative graphical representations of high dimensional data. I mean, bar charts by definition can only show two dimensions at a time. Show me three, show me four. How would you do that? It's so difficult., I'm sure there's someone working at Tableau. There has to be at least one person, please let there be one person who's worrying about how to do more high dimensional data and visualize it for people. And they're probably struggling cause it's really difficult. And I'm sure someone will say on the product side or whatever and say, Oh, what are you doing? People don't want that. They just want the 2D and it's too much load. And haven't you read Kahneman and the optical illusions and people are dumb. Um, because I have not seen any evidence that Tableau is really trying to push the envelope on what can be displayed on, on a flat screen that gives us enough information. So anyway, I think that was just a side example of another product that I think had the potential to be something that enables us to augment our intelligences and allow us to consume things given our cognitive constraints, but is. stumbling a little bit because it's really, it's a lot of work to come up with these ways. But, um, Tufte's examples show that it can be done in pretty complicated spaces. And, uh, actually the Joy Division album cover for is an example of a beautiful visualization pulsars that shows you time frequency in many layers in one go, it's immediately legible.

Ernest: 31:10

Well, actually, two things. One is that is one of the things that has me excited about the potential for augmented reality. You know, we haven't really seen it yet, but the potential to uh, present data in a much not dumbed down, but it's much more understandable, um, actionable way for people. So, uh, I hope that we'll start to see that, that potential realized, but, um, an example that comes to mind is actually one that you've cited in the past, which is Google maps. I think that is an incredibly elegant system that. is built around the needs of the user and adapts to the needs of the user, invisibly. If you are following directions and take a wrong turn, it doesn't scold you. You know, it just recalculates and, you know, finds the best route based on your current context. So, I think that's an example of showing that, yeah, you can do this. It's possible. It does lead to huge affinity for your product if you do, uh, put the

Joachim: 32:22

yeah, I think that's a really good one because the maps are, they're super dense with information and, and the seamless movement from reading mode where you're just plotting your path as opposed to you have to navigate the path the way the map goes from high resolution to lower resolution with just essential information, perfectly understanding cognitive load and the shifts of your mental modes that you're in. And, Kahneman does mention this idea that there are these fast systems, there are these slow systems, the more there's time to think through stuff. And there's sometimes, he always still has that message that it's hard to overcome these biases. And I don't know, I think again, there's a way to overcome it if you give people the tooling and yeah, split the Google maps is yeah, you're right. That is, I'm not going to add anything else. That's a really good example of a great navigation tool that just, um, gives you just the right amount of information and when needed can give you more and help you navigate the environment

Ernest: 33:19

Yeah, I, I cribbed that

Joachim: 33:22

trying I don't know if talked about it in an episode. No. So this could have been, this could have been like the day. Um,

Ernest: 33:30

ha.

Joachim: 33:32

it's. It's one that we've all experienced the value of and like you said, it's very adaptable

Ernest: 33:38

yes, I agree. I think Google Maps is a, mapping in general and Google being kind of the standard bearer for this is a great example. And it might seem like, oh, well, that's maps, right? How's that relevant to me if I make a physical widget? But, uh, Just like you were talking about earlier, Joachim, I think there is an opportunity whether you're making a digital experience or physical product to spend more time thinking about the context in which your customer is using your products. I think we tend as product makers to think that there's one right way to use a product or run one right way into a product. And. You know, I think the Google Maps example shows us that that's not the case, you know. There are all kinds of different things that can happen. Maybe you get distracted, so you miss a turn, and you need to be rerouted. Um, so, Try to kind of get outside of that dogma that, I think a lot of us develop around the products that we, we spend so much time thinking about and, um, consider that there may be different ways in that, to you at first glance might seem irrational, but, um, in the life of your customers, makes complete sense. So, being willing to have that empathy. I think is really important and could be really powerful for, for anyone making products. So, kind of just put yourself in, in that frame of mind. Imagine you had a maps app that you took a wrong turn, scolded you, know, and said you're doing it wrong. Um, you know, that's kind of what happens with a lot of different domains of products. so I think just trying to bear that in mind is,

Joachim: 35:27

I would say this though music equipment makers have really been pushing the boundaries on user interaction design especially devices that involve generating sound. manipulating sound Um there's two things that are really interesting. So my favorite examples are two companies. One is, um, 10, 10 music who make various, uh, modules. One of them is a sampler, the 10, 10 music black box. Which has an incredibly, simple setup. Uh, I was up and running within a couple of minutes. I've worked with samplers in the past, so it's probably helps that I've done that. But it has a single touch screen, four knobs, a couple of other buttons that handle things. And it's pretty straightforward. It's unique. The operating system is its own. unique operating system. It uses its own way of describing things. but you can do all kinds of crazy stuff, grab a sample, change the pitch, slice it up. It's really complicated things that you want to do to make interesting music and it can do it all with a unique user interface that doesn't patronize you high details. It's honest and it's honest about there's a learning curve. And I think that's also part of the thing that musical instrument makers have understood is there's always a learning curve. I would like. more products to be willing to engage with the idea. The other company that does a great job is Electron. They have a number of instruments, including the Octatrack. That's also a sampler has totally different workflow, unique to them again. Uh, and again, usable after that learning curve, not too steep. You can start doing things off the bat and then. If you want to go deeper, you can go as deep as you want to go. There's these different depths that allow the user to just go, I just want to do this very straightforward thing, or I need to do something more complex. And it's all there, but only if you want to go to that depth. And both of these products have that feature, you can just kind of do the thing you want to do, or you can go deep. And that is unique in instrument makers. I don't think I've seen other products that, uh, allow you to kind of pick your level and then explore down, and get into the weeds on stuff like that. So that's definitely, I think maybe if you're a product innovator and you don't engage with musical instruments or anything like that, I think There's a lot of stuff to be learned there and maybe just pop into a local synth shop and have someone walk you through how these things work because there's a lot of interesting, there's a lot of interesting language that they've developed around how to interface with music and stuff inside of a box. so we'll put links to all of those products in there as well because they're pretty cool. But, you know, again, I think that that could be a really useful place to start where you see how complex it can be. Dialed up and dialed down, but not by the maker, but by the user who then says, I want to go deep.

Ernest: 38:22

Oh, that's a great example. It kind of makes me think of Minecraft as well as being another platform uh I think gaming space, but allows for quite a bit of extensibility by the users, um, in a way that might seem pretty complicated at first glance, but, um, Um, you know, can also be

Joachim: 38:46

Yeah. one that Minecraft is great because it's again, that whole, you want to just play it. You can just play it. You want to build a computer inside of Minecraft? Go ahead. You can build a computer, you know, and people have built rudimentary CPUs inside of Minecraft, you know, and it's just absolutely insane, but totally doable. But you don't have to do that. You can just play the game. Again, it never obscured any of the stuff. You can just go deep.

Ernest: 39:16

I thought I might share one last quote. You know, we've been maybe somewhat negative when it comes to Kahneman's key, things that he's been known for. But, um, yeah, I mentioned earlier one of the things that I really admire about him is, is, his willingness to change his mind. And, um, there's a quote that I'd love to share that comes from an interview he did with, um, Stephen D. Levitt, who is, famous for Freakonomics. And I, I think you could say is like a disciple of, Kahneman in that he's focused on behavioral economics, but he had Kahneman on his Other podcasts called people. I mostly admire. Uh, this was back in 2021. He recently rebroadcast this interview after Kahneman's passing. And there was this one exchange that I really,, really enjoyed. So Levitt starts, uh, the host, Steven D Levitt starts. He asks to Kahneman, why do you think you'd like to change your mind when virtually everyone else fights desperately to cling to what they believed yesterday? Kahneman replies, For me, when I change my mind is the pure experience of having learned something. That's when I'm sure I've learned something. Yesterday I was stupid, and now I've seen the light. And so that's the experience of changing one's mind, and if you view it that way, it's quite pleasant. Leavitt retorts, So what, if anything, would you tell a young person that might help them to make choices that would lead to a life worth living? And Kahneman replies, You have to be willing, if you're a scientist or if you're a researcher, You have to be willing to discard ideas that don't work. And if you find yourself very obstinately sticking to ideas that don't work, You're in the wrong profession. That's one piece of advice that I would give, but otherwise I don't believe in giving advice. but I think it's very good advice, and I think it kind of gets to the heart of what we've been talking about, that ultimately you have to be willing to uh, investigate these things for yourself, and, acknowledge when you're wrong and learn, use that as an opportunity to learn. And I love that someone, you know, who at the time of this interview was, I think in his mid to late eighties, was still willing to do that, even though he had, achieved all this, all these accolades in his life up till then. So, um, you know, as, as down as maybe we've been on Kahneman, I think there's a lot we can learn from him as well. All

Joachim: 41:41

Yeah I like that That's a a positive note It's funny that he says that because that's exactly kind of the theme that's come out of what we're saying right Is that people have that ability to update to learn to let go of something that they didn't like They can get better and they can not fall into those traps again And so that's useful

Ernest: 41:59

Well, now that you've heard our perspectives, we want to hear from you. Have you found value in Daniel Kahneman's work or more broadly in the field of behavioral economics that was built atop his and Amos Tversky's research? Or as we referred to earlier, as Tim Adams wrote, do you see it as more like a series of sticking plasters that lack any real power when it comes to real world challenges? We want to hear what you think. Please share your thoughts with us at learnmakelearn at gmail. com. Now, let's move on to our recommendations of the week. Joachim, you have a recommendation

Joachim: 42:36

Uh easy one this week. Um, it's a podcast that I've been enjoying quite a bit. It's called if books could kill. The two hosts have given themselves the challenge of, they call it reviewing, but really they're just destroying that are airport bestsellers So they're the books that you find when you come to the airport, Hudson news or whatever, the front table, there's always a nonfiction book that's there and they just go through the list. And so actually they cover Freakonomics. scathing reviews. they cover nudge also scathing. There are unashamedly full blown leftists. Of course, a lot of that perspective is colored by that, but, they do really try and dig into, first of all, the legacy of these works. and, do their best to actually determine the truth value of what these books were selling. And sometimes they find that everything is just a mix of exaggeration and truth. So it's really good practice as you were hinting before that it's a good practice to just take a step back and ask some basic questions. even if the people that are writing these things or saying these things, proclaiming these things are highly fated, very famous, celebrities, it's still worth just assessing, is this sensible and is this useful? And is this right? So these guys are doing that with a lot of humor. And I've really been thoroughly enjoying it. Um, And they're so biased, it's fine. You know where they stand. So it's not like they're pretending be neutral. These guys do not want to be neutral. They want to be opinionated and they know where they stand. And so it's very nice to actually, not be in that, uh, the, the little middle spot where on the one hand, this, on the other hand, that they go like, absolutely not. Everything is wrong. And this is why it's wrong, so that's my recommendation for this week.

Ernest: 44:31

that's a great one. I can't wait to check them out. Um, on my end, I have a, uh, I wanted to get back to a physical product recommendation. I don't think I've done one in a little while, um, to give you some context here. If you've grown up in an Asian household, you know, that rice is very important, a staple that, you know, pretty much every meal. And so, you will often have, rice in the house. And you need some way to store it. So, growing up, I recall we had this very large storage bin for rice. And, um, it was functional in that it let you kind of, uh, dose out rice in the pot. predetermined quantities so that, you could cook it up, but, um, it was pretty ugly and I found that to be the case in many of these, uh, rice storage solutions that I've seen. Most of them tend to be pretty utilitarian looking, but I recently came across this, um, rice bin from a Japanese company called Masuda Kiribako. We'll provide a link to it. I purchased it from an online retailer called Jinen and I I love it because it's incredibly functional. It does what it's meant to do very well, you know, which is to hold rice, but it's also beautiful. And it's this great example of a class of products which I love, which is products that take the sorts of things that you usually try to hide because they're ugly and makes them beautiful so that you're not only willing but happy to give them pride of place out in the open. So, you know, rice bin, typically something you'd want to hide away somewhere in a pantry or in a drawer. But this, uh, Masuda Kiribako rice bin is so beautiful that you just want to put it out in the open. Uh, so we have it, right out in the open in our kitchen. So there's a few things that make it so great. One, it's made of this particular kind of wood called paulownia that's meant to have humidity controlling and also insect repelling properties just inherently. Um, but besides those things, it's also a very beautiful wood and, the wood is left, uh, appears to be left raw. It's not, um, varnished in any way. So it's just got a beautiful appearance. What's also very clever is that the boxes, they, the bins, they come in three different sizes. But if you look at them from above, the X, Y dimensions are all the same. The only difference is in their height. So the VOD, the increase in volume, the difference in volume between the three sizes they offer. is all driven by the height of the bin and that's great because it means that you can stack them. So maybe you have one that's for brown rice and one that's for jasmine or, short grain, et cetera. So you can have those and stack them and, really, uh, take up very little space. another really beautiful touch and you kind of have to see this, but the, bin has this cover that has a really nice to touch wooden handle. and then the top of the cover is glass. So you can see through into the bin and see how much rice is left. But the thing that's so clever is that each bin comes with a wooden measuring cup and it's exactly, one serving of rice. But the thing that I just can't get over how wonderful it is, is the wooden. Measuring cup has a magnet embedded into the wood. So it's not visible, as far as you can see, this measuring cup is just purely made of wood, but it has a magnet inlaid into the wood and the lid of the bin has a magnet inlaid into it as well. So that measuring cup just. attaches to the top of the lid like magic, cause there's no visible magnets. It's just that they attach to each other. So you don't have to think about where you put that measuring cup. you don't lose it. It's just always going to be on the lid of the bin. So it's just this beautiful object that also is incredibly functional, um, and very thoughtfully designed. You know, it's just clear that these people use these products. And so they thought about all these challenges that you have associated with them and, um, designed their product around those things. So the Masuda Kiribako rice bin, um, is the thing that I want to highlight today. Or do you have any

Joachim: 48:56

we use, uh, just OXO, large OXO containers that have a little vacuum thingy on them. and that's fine. It does the job, but. Now I have an excuse maybe an excuse to try something nicer but I also wanted to, add, I wanted to um, on the description, they point out that the box is made without the use of nails or screws, so it's just using Japanese joinery, and then I actually just, I'm going to, I'm going to have a second recommendation. You've done this. I'm just, I'm going to book I, um, recently got this um, called The Art of Japanese Joinery, which is by Seike Kiyoshi. Um, it is a skinny paperback book, pretty old from the 70s, but it just has high resolution pictures of all these books. really traditional joints that, uh, Japanese carpenters had been using for hundreds of years. and the book really talks about the beauty of using wood and the benefits also from a practical perspective of earthquake prone countries like Japan, things can move and shift. And it's just really fascinating, um, to look at these joints and how they work because there's no nails involved. You know, it's all wood. the rice box just reminded me of that fine Japanese joinery stuff. If you don't want to look at the book, there is a very unique Twitter account called the joinery underscore JP that has animations for various, Japanese joints. And it's very mesmerizing. So we'll add that in the show notes as well. But the fact that this box has no nails just reminded me of the fine art of Japanese joinery work. It's, it is absolutely fascinating.

Ernest: 50:35

Oh, about a rabbit

Joachim: 50:38

Yeah, seriously. You can

Ernest: 50:40

This is

Joachim: 50:41

You can go deep. go deep.

Ernest: 50:44

All right. Well, I think that does it for us. Thank you so much for joining us here at Learn Make Learn. As we mentioned, we want to hear from you. So please send any questions or feedback to learnmakelearn at gmail. com and tell your friends about us. In our next episode, we're going to discuss the idea that When it comes to products and product innovation, in our new, much more typical era of relatively high interest rates, enough is enough. We'll explain more and dive into this topic in detail on the next Learn Make Learn.