Heuristics over Franklin's Moral Algebra

[the_fat_man]

Interesting article about research at the Max Planck institute showing that simple heuristics kicks ass over advantage mathematical calculations when it comes to decision making.
Read about it here. (http://www.newsweek.com/id/71514/page/1)

Less is more, folks.

[rastajenk]

That's why I still use Beyers, "fast and efficient cognitive shortcuts."

:)

[098poi]

I just got home, saw this on Yahoo and was about to post it! Interesting article.

[46zilzal]

More substantiation for the book BLINK by Gladwell.

[OTM Al]

Heuristics are useful but they can be subject to mistake and each individual piece has its own inherant bias. More is ALWAYS better in decision making in theory, but each individual has different processing capabilities and can be limited by the amount of time. Basically this says throw out the information you don't fully understand, rank order what's left by what you feel is most important, weigh your options accordingly and go. However, this is not to say that you couldn't make even better decisions if you were able to better comprehend something you initially could not understand or process.

I did experimental economics back in my grad school days and it was always very interesting to try to figure out how the subjects were approaching the problem, especially when they deviated from theoretical predictions. Very often, they could figure out rules of thumb for what to do and it was in many ways basically the right thing even when the actual solutions to the problems weren't even analytically solvable.

[Gibbon]

Does More Dope Just Make Us Dopier?
by Gordon Pine
http://www.netcapper.com/TrackTractsArchive/TT010427.htm

[bigmack]

More substantiation for the book BLINK by Gladwell.
Exponential bosh.

So what is the moral of "Blink's" many stories? It's hard to say. First impressions are valuable except when they're wrong. Then they are useless or dangerous. This conclusion is surely true, but it is also frustratingly ambivalent.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB110539846693722072.html?mod=arts%255Fand%255Frev iews%255Farts%255Fonly%255Fhs

Snap judgments are arrived at by a ruthless pruning of information, which our brains process without our being aware of it. A good snap judgment occurs when the information which has been discarded is irrelevant to the matter in hand; a bad one when it is not. An overload of information leads to a paralysis of judgment, which is why information-gathering bureaucracies are often not merely inefficient but grotesquely error-prone.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/02/13/bogla13.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/02/13/bomain.html

However viable "Blink" may be, it is undercut by naggingly bad grammar. Throughout the book, an editor has allowed Mr. Gladwell to conflate the singular and plural. To make successful decisions, he writes, we need "the ability to know our own mind" and how psychoanalytic patients learn "how their mind works" and so on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/books/06masl.html?_r=1&oref=login&oref=slogin

[robert99]

Humans are gullible suckers for quick and easy fixes.
Very few ever make any attempt to make a concious decision (far too hard) but drift with the flow or ask some friend. Ask someone exactly why they married their partner?

The article misses out the real problem in decision making, which is "what is the right question to ask in the first place?" Once that is sorted, the rest follows very easily.
The simplistic examples given of the child breathing and choice of school both came up with the wrong answers by asking the wrong questions which should have been simply I need to stabilise my child's breathing as soon as possible and I need the best education for my kid.

The decision to build a 35 mile tunnel to join France with England came down to 4 questions on one sheet of paper. Getting those 4 questions took over 200 years to formulate. People's life decisions don't often occur out of the blue. A parent worries what they can do with a sick child from the day it is born. They also think about future schooling long before it ever goes to its first school or starts to read.

We are all paying for the national hunch decisions that are so quick to make but so costly to unentangle.

The non consideration of what to do in Iraq post the toppling of Saddam is one example; another is the decision of financial institutions not to go for the best model but to "choose" the one all the others were using (so they could not be criticised for a wrong decision) led to the sub-prime fiasco spreading all over, into areas nothing to do with mortgages. If you ask the wrong questions or don't ask the right questions, you get the wrong answers.

[46zilzal]

Does More Dope Just Make Us Dopier?
by Gordon Pine
http://www.netcapper.com/TrackTractsArchive/TT010427.htm
Yes, but the crowd never thinks so.