Gerd Gigerenzer

Rules of thumb work. This book combines logic and psychology to explain why they work best when things are most uncertain. Instinct has saved us from extinction so far, and number-crunching proves much better in analyzing the past than predicting the future.

Professor Gigerenzer credits Einstein with the idea of "less is more," although the scientist never said it so simply. The book's rules are pretty simple: Worry about things that'll surely kill you, like bad diets and sedentary ways. show more Invest in ways you understand. Find what you're looking for, and look no more.

Gigerenzer doesn't let you off the hook for making things too simple. Name recognition can be a handy gauge of quality, but brand names can coast on their reputation -- people choose second-best to protect themselves if something goes wrong. The author wants to make sure you know the risks, and not to assume your doctor or banker knows better.

Less is more in this book: No glossary's needed, although Gigerenzer perversely provides one to hold all the heavy statistical theory. He goes into some depth about expecting false positives in test results and marginal improvements from medical procedures or prescription drugs. I question at least one of his rules of thumb: The more the media report on a health risk, the smaller the danger to you. It's not like smoking hasn't gotten any press. But I'll take his point: If you're concerned now about measles, you should at least have Googled the CDC by now. show less

Da ingegnere ero partito in università ad osannare parole come "ottimizzazione", "minimizzare", "estremi", e ad apprezzare la razionalità bayesiana in quanto normativa e da approssimare per quanto possibile.
E' anche vero che l'overfitting e l'eccesso di informazione venivano comunque visti negativamente.

Poi è arrivata la psicologia cognitiva, e sono passato ad un approccio descrittivo della ir-razionalità dei decisori reali, facendomi grasse risate alle spalle degli economisti e dei show more teorici dei giochi.

Ora con Gigerenzer bisogna togliersi, insieme a Darwin, il cappello e riconoscere quanto l'adattamento alla scarsità di informazione e l'uso di metodi semplici possa portare lontano, ricordando che l'ottimo è nemico del bene.

Detto questo, la prima metà del libro è densa di esperimenti interessanti, poco noti (a me), o noti ma interpretati da un'angolatura nuova.
Man mano che si procede verso la seconda subentra un po' troppo l'aneddoto, la ripetizione e, in ultima analisi, la noia. show less

After hearing this book described as the "science behind Malcolm Gladwell's Blink," I thought that it might be inaccessible and filled with jargon. Instead, I found that Gigerenzer directs his entertaining and controversial book to the average reader.

His scientific study of intuition in decision-making is fascinating. Throughout the book he defends simple, unconscious thought processes (what we would call intuition), which are usually ignored in favor of complex formulas. For example, many show more scientists—and average people—believe that looking at and carefully weighing twenty factors will lead to a better decision than relying on only one or two factors. But as Gigerenzer illustrates, a basic evolutionary rule of thumb, like “one good reason is enough” often leads to better predictions than an involved multiple regression!

Every chapter had something to surprise me. Besides offering an easy-to-read version of his scientific evidence, Gigenrenzer also provides some real world applications of his theories. I’d still like to read Blink and see how Gladwell draws upon or expands on Gigerenzer’s ideas. show less

A really good introduction into modern research on psychological heuristics. The book is based on three main ideas: 1) many of our decisions are based on fast and frugal rules of thumb (as opposed to exhaustive calculations); 2) these rules are successful because they confer evolutionary advantage (and for this same reason, they are not consciously accessible, i.e. they present themselves as 'gut feelings'); 3) their predictive power comes from the fact that by being simple they avoid show more overfitting the data. I found this book much better written than the average popular science book. In addition to being very clearly written and containing very well chosen entertaining examples, it surprised me with a couple of some really interesting analyses. The first one is an analysis of the one dimensional voter (chapter 8) where Gigerenzer shows experimentally how a) Left-Right linear ordering immediately induces a complete ordering of preferences b) issues that seem orthogonal to Left-Right distinctions very readily get mapped on the same axis by the amount of support that an issue receives from a candidate who already has a location on that axis. The second one is the analysis of 'split-brain' organizations, i.e. organizations that employ very robust heuristics for their decisions ('let's not get sued!') but then confabulate a completely independent set of principles to explain/justify their decisions. show less