From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 15:34:31 MDT
> 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.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Apr 26 2003 - 15:45:59 MDT