Interview with Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is professor of psychology and public affairs emeritus at Princeton University. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 2002.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, MD
Contents
Max Raskin: I'm reading Amos Oz’s book about his childhood and thinking about what heady times it must have been for you to be in Israel at that time around those people. So where I want to start is with Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Was he influential in your intellectual development?
Daniel Kahneman: Oh yes, he was bigger than life. I knew him quite well because when we first came to Israel and I was in eighth grade, his son was my best friend, so I was often in their home. He was an amazing character with multiple PhDs and an MD – a very abrupt voice and quite impressive and charismatic. I had him as a teacher in high school as a chemistry teacher.
MR: Wow. Where did you go to high school?
DK: I went to high school in Jerusalem.
MR: What was the name of it?
DK: At that time, it was called Beit-Hakerem High School but now it's the Hebrew University High School and known by the Hebrew word for “near,” because it is attached to the university.
I also had him as a teacher when I went to university – he was teaching physiology. His lectures were so inspiring and exciting that I remember going to a lecture with a temperature of 103 or 104. It was something that you never wanted to miss. It was that good.
MR: And he wasn't lecturing on anything religious?
DK: No, no – he was not. He was religious but I think he wasn't a believer. But I never knew the religious side of him.
MR: Wasn’t he a famous theologian?
DK: He became mostly famous in Israel for his opposition to the occupation, and he was extremely eloquent and used phrases that shocked the public like “Jewish Nazis.”
MR: …and “diskotel” [a portmanteau of discotheque and Kotel (the Western Wall)].
DK: He had a very big following on this issue because he was one of the first, and he was very extreme in his choice of words and quite unafraid of offending. He didn't care. He was morally very brave. And at the same time, he was very decent.
MR: His sister was also a famous thinker.
DK: Yes, she was. I think she was a biblical scholar.
He had interests in everything. I should say that part of the humor of his physiology class is that while I found it absolutely fascinating, later I realized I don't think he was right.
He had something that was very striking – I still remember it almost 70 years later. He would draw the sensory nerves to a center and then there were motor nerves going out – and then there was a huge question mark in the middle, and he would almost break the chalk. I still remember the sound of the chalk hitting the blackboard. He was an extraordinary figure.
MR: Were there any other people in that category? In that Oz book, he talks about Bialik and Agnon…
DK: If he talks about Bialik, Bialik was dead by then.
MR: But that milieu of early Zionists and refugees – I guess I was thinking from the early 30s until the early 50s.
DK: Well, we were all very caught up in patriotism at the time. The period of the war was very threatening and also exhilarating – I still remember. It started in November ‘47 with the UN decision for the partition.
MR: Do you remember where you were?
DK: Yes. I remember that – I remember dancing in the streets, which is what happened.
MR: Were you in Tel Aviv?
DK: I was in Jerusalem in November ‘47. There was a siege of Jerusalem, but my mother and I escaped to Tel Aviv. My sister remained there, and she fought in the war. We didn't know all the things that have become known in recent decades about what the Jews did to the Arabs and the expulsions and so on. At the time, we swallowed everything that we were told – it was a purely defensive war and quite heroic – which it was in many ways.
MR: Did you ever meet Ben-Gurion?
DK: No, I never met him, but he was a heroic figure, an epic figure. I still remember my cousin – who later was president of the university, but he was 11 at the time – asking me whether Ben-Gurion goes to the toilet. It seemed so strikingly impossible.
MR: I think Montaigne has this quote that’s like, “On the highest throne in the world, man still sits on his ass.”
DK: He was bigger than life. It was very exciting. I remember episodes from that period including the day on which the state of Israel was announced – the 14th of May. I went with my cousin to row on the Yarkon – the river in north Tel Aviv. That was the afternoon on where this was happening…I was 14.
MR: Were you partying?
DK: No, that was just my cousin and I, but it was really very festive that day. There was a sense that the memories of the Holocaust were still very much on peoples’ minds. I had come to Israel from France where we had spent the war years. The contrast between being a hunted rabbit during the war and fighting for ourselves – it was a huge thing for me and for many others.
MR: Do you have any habits from the war years that stay with you? My father is a surgeon, and he always ate very quickly because of when he was training as a resident. Do you have anything like that? Do you eat quickly? Do you hoard food?
DK: No. No.
MR: That's interesting.
DK: It was a somewhat different childhood than others, but it was nothing compared to what others suffered.
MR: Was it a purely secular Zionism?
DK: It's mostly secular. There were the ultra-religious who were not Zionist, and they were largely segregated and largely ignored. They have hugely increased in numbers in Israel and have become a potent political force, but at the time they were not. The religious Zionists were just part of the movement. They were wearing yarmulkes, but they were otherwise on the whole quite moderate. I remember growing up with a sense that religion had one generation to go and then it would disappear because all the people I know were less religious than their parents, who were in turn less religious than their parents. Extrapolating from those two generations, I thought this was it. I distinctly remember that thought from my adolescence.
MR: There's two kinds of people in the world. There's those who can extrapolate from limited data sets…
Rabbi Kahaneman
MR: Let me ask you this, were you ever religious in your life?
DK: No. I went to a religious school. My uncle on my father's side was one of the most famous rabbis in Israel.
MR: Who was it?
DK: He was called Rabbi Kahaneman…you can find him on Wikipedia, there is a lot about him there. There is the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, and that was his. So he was religious and my mother's family was also moderately religious.
I went to a religious school in my first year in Israel. We arrived in 1946 and until we escaped in early 1948, I was in religious school. And actually, I was still in religious school in Tel Aviv for a year, but I lost my faith.
MR: You studied Gemara and Mishnah?
DK: Yes, I did, but not intensely.
MR: Did you believe in God at the time?
DK: I must have believed because I remember very precisely the moment at which I stopped believing in God.
MR: When was that?
DK: I must have been 15, and I remember where I was because it was very sudden insight.
MR: Where were you?
DK: I was in Jerusalem, and I remember where.
MR: Where was it?
DK: I was walking home, and I had the insight that maybe I could believe in God, but I could not believe in a God that cared whether or not I masturbate. That was a very sudden insight. That if I can't imagine God caring about me, then we were irrelevant to each other, and it really didn't matter whether he existed or not. And that was the end of the religion for me.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
DK: No.
MR: Nothing?
DK: No.
MR: And no reincarnation?
DK: No. There's nothing mystical.
MR: Do you meditate?
DK: No. I'm not really spiritual in any significant way.
MR: Do you play chess?
DK: I do. Not very well, but I did, yes.
MR: Do you have a favorite opening?
DK: Oh, don't ask me it's been decades. I play the King’s Gambit.
MR: I play the King’s Gambit!
A Scribe in Jerusalem
MR: What’s the most difficult thing you do nowadays in terms of intellectual activities?
DK: I still do research and it's quite difficult. I try to understand papers – I find that difficult.
MR: “Judgment under Uncertainty” – it’s a very short paper. Do you think that the quality of paper has changed since you were writing?
DK: In what ways?
MR: I feel with more specialization, people can't write papers like yours anymore. Do you think that's right or no? I could be totally wrong.
DK: Nobody could write that paper – that paper was unique. And the reason it was unique was that it was very different in format from other papers. The reason it was influential – all of that is really an accident.
I was very influenced as an undergraduate by the Gestalt School. Those were people whose books were full of illustrations like illusions or figure-ground effects that were supposed to work on the reader so that the reader was a subject. If you look at our work, we did this thing.
MR: It's a joy to read.
DK: What makes it work is that the reader is a participant, the reader is a subject. You get those puzzles, and they work on you. That is unique – not in terms of uniquely brilliant, but there is just no other topic on which you can do that. We happened to hit on a topic that permitted these things.
MR: Did you write the initial draft in English or in Hebrew?
DK: Everything was in English.
MR: The writing is beautiful and it’s just a pleasure to read. Are there any writers that influenced you?
DK: Nothing of which I'm aware. Amos [Tversky] and I wrote every word together, and we spent a lot of time on every sentence. And we really tried not to have a superfluous word. The prose doesn’t flow because every word was chosen. We spent almost a year writing those five pages. We did little else.
MR: Where would you actually write?
DK: There is a place in Jerusalem called the Van Leer Institute. It's a lovely place – it’s sort of the center of intellectual life. The director of it was a friend of mine and he gave us a room that we could work in.
MR: Did you write it by pen?
DK: By pen. I was the scribe, usually. Amos would sometimes edit and then he would work in pencil.
MR: How do you write today – by pen or on a computer?
DK: No, I write on a computer.
Subject as Subject
MR: Did you know you had something special right after you finished it?
DK: What do you mean by special? We thought it was good. We had no idea of how significant it would turn out to be. And the reason we didn't was that it was adopted as part of what was called later, the Great Rationality Debate. That is a debate on the rationality of people, but I don't think the word “rationality” is there in that paper.
MR: You say you don't like the term irrational.
DK: We don't like it at all. Because I think it's a complete misunderstanding. To claim we were studying irrationality – we absolutely were not. All the examples that we deal with were examples that worked on us. It’s just that we knew better because we had thought about the statistics. But every intuition that we described was an intuition that we found appealing, and we never thought we were irrational or stupid or anything like that. I really hate that word. And the word “rationality” in my mind is a technical word. It describes logic, and people cannot be rational in that sense anymore that they can speak perfectly grammatically. Obviously, they don't.
MR: Do people ask that of you? There’s all these cognitive biases and heuristics that exist – do people ask if you think you’ve graduated beyond them?
DK: It's a question that I often get, and I tell people that my thinking has not improved in all the years that I’ve been doing this.
MR: When you write do you listen to music?
DK: I used to for many years until I found that it actually distracts me.
MR: Do you listen to music today?
DK: No, very little now. For years I spent the whole day listening to music.
MR: What would you listen to?
DK: Schubert was my favorite and Mozart.
MR: The early days of Israel with all those refugees who were just brilliant musicians – the philharmonic must have been incredible. The fifth chair could have been the first chair anywhere else.
DK: Actually, the big development in Israeli music was when the Russians came. The Russians came and there were hundreds of violinists and orchestras. Violinists and mathematicians. That was a big change on the musical scene.
Nobel Nod
MR: Your new book is a collaboration with other authors. In your life you've really collaborated with people.
DK: I've done almost nothing by myself. I've always collaborated.
MR: Seeing you and Tversky – it looks like Lennon and McCartney.
DK: We've been compared to them. That's a compliment.
MR: This book that was written, The Undoing Project – what is it like to have a relationship with someone dramatized?
DK: It's mildly unpleasant.
MR: Are you surprised at the folk hero status that you've attained?
DK: Oh, sure. I mean, I never anticipated it. It's not something that's really part of how I live. I don't live it every day.
MR: Where were you when you found out about the Nobel Prize?
DK: Home. Some people are surprised, but I think many people are not surprised. And in fact, many people wait by the telephone because they know when it's about to happen and they know they're shortlisted.
MR: Were you surprised?
DK: No.
MR: You got a tip off?
DK: No. There was an audition a year earlier, which was clearly an audition. It was convened by the Nobel committee – it was a workshop in behavioral and experimental economics with participants. It’s not just the candidates but the whole cast of people who have been influenced by the candidates.
MR: When you got the call, what was your first thought? Do you remember your emotional state?
DK: Of course I remember – everybody remembers those things.
MR: I don't remember those things.
DK: Everybody who's had that experience remembers it. My wife and I were waiting and then the call didn't come. I remember I was writing a reference letter for someone, and my wife went to exercise and then I got the phone call. They really take care so you'll know it's not a prank. I forget the exact detail, but they make sure that you’ll believe them. And then I went to the bedroom where my wife was exercising, and I told her I got it. And she said, “You got what?”
MR: This is a silly question, but do you jump up and down?
DK: No, but it's a big deal of course.
Lieutenant Kahneman
MR: You mentioned remembering the establishment of the State of Israel. What other historical events in your life are blazed in your memory?
DK: It’s not historical, but for me my military service was a very important period in my life in different ways. I was in the infantry for a year and that was sort of an antidote to being a Jew.
MR: Were you a good infantryman?
DK: Yes. I was a lieutenant. I was quite good.
MR: Were you athletic?
DK: I was in very good shape then. I'm not an athlete – Amos was more athletic than I was, but I was in very good shape, yes.
MR: Do you exercise now?
DK: Yes.
MR: What do you do?
DK: I have a cardio glide. It's not quite like a rowing machine – you push with your feet and pull with your arms.
MR: Do you exercise every day?
DK: Yes – I do that for 40 minutes a day when watching thrillers.
MR: What thrillers do you watch?
DK: Right now, I'm watching an Islandic thriller, Trapped – it’s very good.
MR: What are some thrillers you love?
DK: Breaking Bad. There’s The Sopranos.
MR: Who’s your favorite character in The Sopranos?
DK: The hero.
MR: Did you like Hitchcock?
DK: Not particularly, no. I would say I'm a fan of French films right now. There is a French-speaking spy series called The Bureau – the first two seasons are wonderful.
MR: What do you read in the morning for your news?
DK: The New York Times, and then I get the feed from the Washington Post that ruins my life because I look at it too often – I get their opinion pieces that stream all day long – opinions and news.
MR: You don't turn it off?
DK: I'm thinking about it.
MR: That's funny.
DK: Yes. I'm not a very disciplined person.
Kahneman and Tverskys
MR: Why do you like thrillers?
DK: Always have.
MR: Were there any moments in the army when you were very scared?
DK: I was in scary situations.
MR: Are you cool under pressure?
DK: Yeah.
MR: Was Amos like that as well?
DK: Oh, he was altogether exceptional in those respects.
MR: Do you think about him every day?
DK: Well, yes. His widow and I live together.
I think of her research as more physiological and it’s like your early research on pupil dilation, which was very physiological. Do you still think about that at all?
DK: Oh yes. It turns out that there's a big resurgence of interest in that. I wrote a book almost 50 years ago now called Attention and Effort, which was based on that work. There’s a lot of interest in those topics – including the pupil – over the last 15 years or so.
MR: Which ads it looks at.
DK: Well no, it's mainly as an indication of mental effort.
MR: Do you and Barbara ever talk about your work together?
DK: Yes, of course.
MR: That must be a lot of fun.
She's very cultured – and I don’t want to insult you – but she is very high brow in her taste, and it seems like you have the same tastes as me with Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. What’s that like?
DK: But I also like the theater and I also like ballet. I’m not only thrillers.
MR: Will you crack open a beer and watch sports at all?
DK: No. I used to for a brief period. Amos used to watch basketball a lot. There was a period when I watched but very little.
MR: Do you drink wine or beer?
DK: I drink wine – mostly to flavor a sparkling water.
MR: You live in New York now, correct?
DK: Yes.
MR: Is there anything you miss from Israel food-wise?
DK: Oh yeah, pickles. Pickles in brine is what I miss. Most other things we can find, but for some reason those are hard to find.
MR: Do you have any favorite restaurants that you enjoy ordering from?
DK: There’s a very good Italian restaurant that I recommend ordering from – L'Artusi.
MR: Do you like pizza?
DK: No, not particularly, but we do order a large amount of Italian food.
MR: What's your favorite? What dish do you get?
DK: Lasagna. When I have my choice, I'll do a lot of steak tartare and a lot of sashimi.
MR: This has been so much fun for me. Did I ask questions that you don't normally get asked?
DK: Yes, you ask very odd questions.
MR: You know what I do is I read someone's Wikipedia page and whatever's not on it, I want to ask about. Thank you so much for doing this. Do you have any final thoughts?
DK: There is so much.