Even with Kaj’s highlight comments, which are helpful, I don’t feel educated enough in the economics area (one semester of high school Econ) to tell whether this is 1) vigorous academic debate or
2) damning evidence of academic fraud by Kahneman and Tversky.
Given how K&T are pretty central to parts of the Sequences, and that Judgment Under Uncertainty is at the top of my book pile—can someone with some expertise in this area give their take? I would donate $20 to Givewell for 500+ words that helped me to understand this situation.
Academic here, it’s (1). Loss aversion is so popular that people think it underpins everything. Although loss aversion doesn’t show up in every dataset, it does show up (https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1156) - even the “second paper” shared by Kaj just says it appears sometimes. But does that mean it explains all these other findings? No! But some reviewers or authors think “isn’t that just loss aversion?” and it seems authors take the easy route to publication (or just aren’t well-read enough) instead of probing the psychological source of their findings more seriously. For example, loss aversion was the classic explanation for the endowment effect, but research in the last couple decades has generated results that loss aversion cannot really explain and that other theories readily explain, yet LA is sometimes still cited as the explanation the authors endorse.
Even with Kaj’s highlight comments, which are helpful, I don’t feel educated enough in the economics area (one semester of high school Econ) to tell whether this is
1) vigorous academic debate or
2) damning evidence of academic fraud by Kahneman and Tversky.
Given how K&T are pretty central to parts of the Sequences, and that Judgment Under Uncertainty is at the top of my book pile—can someone with some expertise in this area give their take? I would donate $20 to Givewell for 500+ words that helped me to understand this situation.
Academic here, it’s (1). Loss aversion is so popular that people think it underpins everything. Although loss aversion doesn’t show up in every dataset, it does show up (https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1156) - even the “second paper” shared by Kaj just says it appears sometimes. But does that mean it explains all these other findings? No! But some reviewers or authors think “isn’t that just loss aversion?” and it seems authors take the easy route to publication (or just aren’t well-read enough) instead of probing the psychological source of their findings more seriously. For example, loss aversion was the classic explanation for the endowment effect, but research in the last couple decades has generated results that loss aversion cannot really explain and that other theories readily explain, yet LA is sometimes still cited as the explanation the authors endorse.
I would also be interested in an explanation of how the replication crisis effects the sequences and willing to put in 10$ to givewell