Name: Rationality for Mortals
ISBN: 9780195328981

Gerd Gigerenzer

This volume collects Gigerenzer's recent articles on the psychology of rationality. This volume should appeal, like the earlier volumes, to a broad mixture of cognitive psychologists, philosophers, economists, and others who study decision making.

How People Cope with Uncertainty

Rationality for Mortals

Gavin

Yet another volley in the ‘rationality wars’. GG sets himself against the heuristics and biases folk (though note he is also not of the fatuous constructionist camp which says, roughly: ‘it’s impossible for everyone to be irrational, because reason is only social, so we are the measure of it’) by minimising the apparent irrationality uncovered by the cognitive sciences in the last little while. Key claims: 
 
-  Heuristics are not just faster or more tractable, but better than Bayesian formalism. 
-  People are not flawed Bayesians but natural frequentists. 
 

But though his work on presenting natural frequencies is super-important, and his points about actual decisions always being 'ecological' (rather than a mathematical problem) I suspect he's (still) 1) attacking a straw version of Kahneman-Gilovich-Slovic-Stanovich: no-one is saying that perfect, everyday Bayesian algorithmics is attainable by humans; nor are the misconceptions in table 1.1 (p.9) ever stated as strongly as this. 

Also 2) GG's evidence on e.g. the framing of the conjunction fallacy doesn't replicate. But anyway this is well-argued, well-written, scientific in the highest sense, and wrong? Read this instead. 

Not as deep as I expected, but I admire his empirical work.

Rationality for Mortals How People Cope with Uncertainty