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- I was amazed what this guy has come up is absolutely revolutionary ...and it's not Mickey Mouse it’s the top selling science book in Germany and in the UK Science bodies have nominated it for awards.
- It destroys the scientific orthodoxey that intuition is crap
and shows Scientifically Intuition is better than logic
... but it turns out we have been using it all along
... and actually it turns out intuition (gut feeling) is logical
- The accepted academic wisdom is that : Intuition is crap and that to make accurate predictions you need complex models and lots of data.. the more data you have the better your predictions.
- 1. Intuition is often crap - when the week after a major accident Americans choose not to fly, but drive a long distance instead deaths increase cos driving is inherently more dangerous than flying. Similarly if red has just come up 6 times on the roulette wheel people will bet on black, though in this case that is illogical cos what happened before has no influence on what will hapoen next there is always a 50/50 chance.
- 2. But in the case of Experts it's different
- e.g.1 The Airport drugs officer-
as 1000s of people pass every day he is able somehow magically to pick out the drugs couriers from people who appear to look exactly the same ... in fact much better than the guys with lots of information and computerised profiling system etc.
- Intuition is a Heuristic strategy instead of taking all data into account one actually ignores most of the available information.
- so sometimes intuition works but we don't know why... or do we.
- When the officer was pressed to explain how he can do this he said "I am looking for someone who is looking for me", i.e. as soon as they make eye contact he recognizes the expression in their face.
.. so there is logic there and it's such a simple logic we mistake it for not being logic at all.
- This shows the character of intiutive strategies : that they are
- 1. based on simpler less number intensive logic, rather than complex analysis
- 2. rely on the experience of the user.
- e.g.2 The Baseball Fielder - When catching a ball he seems to do it the complex way of calculating trajectory etc , but actually uses a simple technique which has the same outcome. ie keep looking at the ball and run at such a speed that the eye angle to the ball is constant, so you'll end up under the ball.
- This stategy is actually better than calculation, cos it automatically takes account of weather and windspeed etc. This is a third characteristic of Intuition- 3. There is ongoing resampling and feedback of a simple calculation instead of one huge complicated calculation at the beginning.
Intuition is often anEVOLVED strategy -
just like a fly doesn't calculate where your swatting hand is. It doesn't run huge calculations instead it has evolved to adopt strategies to avoid being swatted to death and it possible that humans have evolved to have many intuitive behaviours like the ball catching strategy hard wired in. And I guess that often we try to adapt these hardwired strategies into new things and if experience teachs us they work then we keep them.
- e.g. 3 the Nobel prize winning economist Markovitz . He proved that there is mathematically optimal way to invest money, by looking at past patterns.
- But when Markovitz invested his own Nobel prize winnings he didn't actually use this stategy rather he followed the traditional investment strategy of when faced wih 'n' options you split the money evenly between the options i.e. 1/n approach
It turns out to make a better decision than the 1/n stategy he would have needed to analyse the last 500 years of investment patterns.
This shows .. simple models can produce better results than complex models.
- e.g. 4 The footballer analysis When they played top footballers a short football video scene most players could choose the most optimal next action. However when you gave them 40s to make a decision their decisions were worse.
- It appears that, the longer time means they look at extra items of data, which they are less expert at. The things they notice in the first 3s are the things they are expert at.
- When you have more time decisions are worse - applies to experts like chicken-sexers etc
Changing ie Picking the best heuristic strategy works better than complex strategy
, when correctly applied. He showed experts would apply one intuitive strategy in one circumstance say The Spring and another intuitive strategy in another circumstance say The Winter.
ie overall the complex stategy gives theb lowest error, but if you pick Heuristic 1 in circumstances Z and realise in Circumstance Y that heuristic is better 2 then you beat complex strategy.
His Summary
- 1 unconscious
- 2 fast
- 3 outperform evolved environmental structure sytems i.e. more time isn't better
- 4 It's often not used in business cos it's easier to be defensive the boss expects a decision with a clear explanation not just gut instinct , but family enterprises are more successful cos don't have to be defensive to boss.
- but it turns out we have been using it all along ...more
My Summary- intuition is better than logic cos it is actually logic, but it often seems appears out of thin air so we don't understand what the background logic is.
- This gives me a revolutionary idea : that instead of using complicated thinking to think up complex logical strategies you could run a computer program which automatically generates and tries out simple possible strategies in a simulation. It would discard strategies that don't work i.e. successful strategies would evolve.
- I went to a revolutionary lecture last night where the German Scientist was able to explain how experts can use intuition more effectively than number crunching logic even though they don't understand how they reach their decisions .. ..it was very clever
Gut Feelings: short cuts to better decision making
Date: Monday 20 October 2008
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Dr Gerd Gigerenzer
Chair: Dr Sandra Jovchelovitch
- We think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. In his lecture Dr Gigerenzer argues that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in our brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. He shows that biased minds that intuitively rely of heuristics can make better inferences about the world than information-greedy statistical algorithms. More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more.
- I have noticed that in
learning language important thing to ignore most info
- Gerd Gigerenzer is the director of the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He has won numerous prizes, including the 1991 AAAS Prize for Behavioural Science Research and the 2002 and 2007 German Science Book of the Year Prize. He has been the Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and the John M. Olin Distinguished visiting Professor at the School of Law, University of Virginia. His most recent book is Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making (Allen Lane, August 2008).
The Space for Thought Lecture series
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