The Intelligence of Intuition

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Buy The Intelligence of Intuition by Gigerenzer, Gerd (ISBN: 9781009304894) from desertcart's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. Review: A must read together with Kahneman - A must read for everyone, but let me tell you a longer story, beginning with another guy. For many years I was a staunch advocate of Daniel Kahneman. I’ve presented many copies of his Thinking Fast and Slow, and even publicly claimed on numerous occasions it was the most important non-fiction book ever published. Then totally by chance I had an opportunity to listen to an interview with Gerd Gigerenzer. Curious to learn more I’ve bought Simple Heuristics That Makes Us Smart. There was a eureka moment, so I decided to continue the journey and I jumped to the latest piece, The Intelligence of Intuition. Now fast reverse to ’70. Messrs. Kahneman and Gigerenzer are peer scientists, publish papers on human cognition, exchange polemics. At that time they tried to understand why a human being is so efficient in solving complex problems. Mr. Gigerenzer remained faithful to this goal, whereas Mr. Kahneman found a more prospective (nomen omen) field, where he devoted his life to pronounce and defend the thesis, that a human being is not efficient at all, because its cognition is marred by array of biases. The Nobel Committee announced the latter to be the winner. What I liked always about Mr. Kahneman is that he remained a modest person also after the Nobel price ceremony. Perhaps it is why in the book which turned out to be his last (Noise) he admitted he was wrong. Indirectly, but still. You can’t analyze everything, because there is too much data, and majority of these data carries no information. Just noise. So you have to focus on what is meaningful = you have to use simple rules. And it is exactly what Mr. Gigerenzer heralded during all his life. Plus the assertion that a man can use these rules consciously or intuitively. In particular the latter was rejected by the opposite camp (however, honesty requires to mention a paper written by Mr. Kahneman together with Gary Klein, where Mr. Kahneman admitted there could be conditions where intuition works). The dichotomy “intuition is bad or good” is obviously false or apparent. The right question sounds: what are prerequisites for intuition to be an efficient problem solver. Mr. Gigerenzer defines some of these conditions, and perhaps it is his biggest contribution: • It is based on long experience, • Appears quickly and without conscious rationale, • Is applied to uncertainty (unorthodox distinction between risk and uncertainty is another important contribution). However, IMHO, there are two more conditions, omitted in the book: • The decision maker must have peace of mind; he cannot be frustrated (BTW if I use “he” I do it without intention to identify gender), • He must have his skin in the game. What’s more, Mr. Gigerenzer does not address the following situations: • A person must decide, but has not a ten-year experience, • A person fulfils the condition of the ten-year experience, however, the world has developed, making this experience obsolete, • A person is aware of the obsoleteness, but the rate of change is too fast to gather updated experience, • The problem is not of tactical nature: do this instead of this, choose between a few options just now, but is strategic. Additionally, both sides of the argumentation lose the populational perspective: if all people took only right decisions, then there would not be variation, a necessary building block of evolution. My strongest advise it to read both Kahneman and Gigerenzer, because their thinking complements. Intuition is not magic and does work (at least under some conditions), heuristics can yield better results than computer models costing millions of dollars, however, at the same time people are prone to manipulation and illusion. * * * I can’t help not commenting the chapter 4 (which I personally would remove together with chapters 2 and 7). The assumption of Mr. Gigerenzer that general public wants to be informed to make good decisions: • Is naïve – see the conditions above, • Can lead to good decisions for the private person, but not necessarily for the society (see prisoner’s dilemma).