Fwd: Smart Heuristics

From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 15:34:31 MDT

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    > SMART HEURISTICS: GERD GIGERENZER [3.31.03]
    >
    > What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with
    > uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong
    > ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people
    > knew
    > that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored.
    > They
    > also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the
    > people
    > that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into
    > one
    > in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do
    > we
    > avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that
    > everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for
    > a
    > particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?
    >
    >
    > Introduction
    >
    > "Isn¹t more information always better?" asks Gerd Gigerenzer. "Why else
    > would bestsellers on how to make good decisions tell us to consider all
    > pieces of information, weigh them carefully, and compute the optimal
    > choice,
    > preferably with the aid of a fancy statistical software package? In
    > economics, Nobel prizes are regularly awarded for work that assumes that
    > people make decisions as if they had perfect information and could
    > compute
    > the optimal solution for the problem at hand. But how do real people make
    > good decisions under the usual conditions of little time and scarce
    > information? Consider how players catch a ball‹in baseball, cricket, or
    > soccer. It may seem that they would have to solve complex differential
    > equations in their heads to predict the trajectory of the ball. In fact,
    > players use a simple heuristic. When a ball comes in high, the player
    > fixates the ball and starts running. The heuristic is to adjust the
    > running
    > speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant ‹that is, the angle
    > between
    > the eye and the ball. The player can ignore all the information necessary
    > to
    > compute the trajectory, such as the ball¹s initial velocity, distance,
    > and
    > angle, and just focus on one piece of information, the angle of gaze."
    >
    > Gigerenzer provides an alternative to the view of the mind as a cognitive
    > optimizer, and also to its mirror image, the mind as a cognitive miser.
    > The
    > fact that people ignore information has been often mistaken as a form of
    > irrationality,and shelves are filled with books that explain how people
    > routinely commit cognitive fallacies. In seven years of research, he, and
    > his research team at Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the
    > Max
    > Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, have worked out what he
    > believes is a viable alternative: the study of fast and frugal
    > decision-making, that is, the study of smart heuristics people actually
    > use
    > to make good decisions. In order to make good decisions in an uncertain
    > world, one sometimes has to ignore information. The art is knowing what
    > one
    > doesn¹t have to know.
    >
    > Gigerenzer's work is of importance to people interested in how the human
    > mind actually solves problems. In this regard his work is influential to
    > psychologists, economists, philosophers, and animal biologists, among
    > others. It is also of interest to people who design smart systems to
    > solve
    > problems; he provides illustrations on how one can construct fast and
    > frugal
    > strategies for coronary care unit decisions, personnel selection, and
    > stock
    > picking.
    >
    > "My work will, I hope, change the way people think about human
    > rationality",
    > he says. "Human rationality cannot be understood, I argue, by the ideals
    > of
    > omniscience and optimization. In an uncertain world, there is no optimal
    > solution known for most interesting and urgent problems. When human
    > behavior
    > fails to meet these Olympian expectations, many psychologists conclude
    > that
    > the mind is doomed to irrationality. These are the two dominant views
    > today,
    > and neither extreme of hyper-rationality or irrationality captures the
    > essence of human reasoning. My aim is not so much to criticize the status
    > quo, but rather to provide a viable alternative."
    >
    > ‹JB
    >
    > GERD GIGERENZER is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and
    > Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and
    > former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the
    > AAAS
    > Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author
    > of
    > Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German
    > translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002.
    > He has also published two academicbooks on heuristics, Simple Heuristics
    > That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded
    > Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate
    > in economics).
    >
    >
    > Full essay:
    >
    > http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gigerenzer03/gigerenzer_p2.html
    >

    -- 
    I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. 
    Sometimes I forget.
    


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