Thursday, April 30, 2015

Decision Making in a Nutshell

Justin Fox has a nice review article in the Harvard Business Review which reviews the three major schools of decision-making (decision analysis, heuristics and biases, and "we're not as stupid as we look"). Particularly fascinating, in an inside baseball sort of way, is the bit about how Gerd Gigerenzer "fatigued" Daniel Kahneman with his arguments:
During an academic year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in 1989–1990, he gave talks at Stanford (which had become Tversky’s academic home) and UC Berkeley (where Kahneman then taught) fiercely criticizing the heuristics-and-biases research program. His complaint was that the work of Kahneman, Tversky, and their followers documented violations of a model, Bayesian decision analysis, that was itself flawed or at best incomplete. Kahneman encouraged the debate at first, Gigerenzer says, but eventually tired of his challenger’s combative approach. The discussion was later committed to print in a series of journal articles, and after reading through the whole exchange, it’s hard not to share Kahneman’s fatigue.

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