Calculated Risks How to Know When Numbers Deceive Review

Gerd Gigerenzer is tireless in examining numbers as a human creation. See his Wikipedia entry and his "Third Culture" biography. Professor Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Knowledge, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.  Quote: " I focus on the most of import grade of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical innumeracy--that is, the disability to reason nearly uncertainties and hazard."

  • 2010: Helping doctors and patients make sense of health statistics: towards an bear witness-based society.  1000. Gigerenzer presented at ICOTS-viii in Ljubljana.   Abstruse: "Collective statistical illiteracy is the phenomenon that the majority of people practise not understand what health statistics mean, or even consistently draw wrong conclusions without noticing. For instance, few are aware that higher survival rates with cancer screening do non imply longer life, or that the statement that mammography screening reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer past 20% in fact means that ane less woman out of one,000 will die of breast cancer. I argue that statistical illiteracy (i) is common to patients, journalists, and physicians alike; (ii) is created by nontransparent framing of information that is sometimes an unintentional result of lack of agreement, but tin also be an intentional attempt to dispense or persuade people; and (3) is a event of the ongoing lack of efficient training in statistical thinking in the educational arrangement."  Video.

  • 2009: Knowing Your Chances: What Health Stats Really Mean Coauthors: Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Elke Kurz-Milcke, Lisa M. Schwartz and Steven Woloshin.  Published in Scientific American (4/09)

  • 2009: Human being heuristicus: Why biased minds brand better inferences. Coauthor: Henry Brighton in Topics in Cerebral Science, 1, 107�143.

  • 2009: Public knowledge of benefits of breast and prostate cancer screening in Europe. Coauthors: J. Mata and R. Frank. Journal of the National Cancer Found, doi:10.1093/jnci/djp1237.

  • 2008: The Advent of Health Literacy.  In answer to the question, "What accept you lot changed your mind about?", Gigerenzer answered, "The bare fact of statistical illiteracy among physicians, patients, and politicians is still not well known, much less addressed, made me pessimistic nearly the chances of any improvement. Statistical illiteracy in health matters turns the ethics of informed consent and shared decision-making into science fiction. Yet I have begun to change my mind. Here are a few reasons why I'yard more optimistic."

  • 2008: Helping Doctors and Patients Brand Sense of Health Statistics, Psychological Scientific discipline In The Public Interest viii(ii): 53-96. Gigerenzer, G., W. Gaissmaier, East. Kurz-Milcke, L.One thousand. Schwartz, & S. "Statistical literacy is a necessary precondition for an educated citizenship in a technological democracy. Agreement risks and request critical questions can also shape the emotional climate in a society so that hopes and anxieties are no longer as easily manipulated from exterior and citizens tin can develop a amend-informed and more relaxed mental attitude toward their wellness."

  • 2008: A survey of health knowledge in seven European countries. Unpublished manuscript. Co-authors: J. Mata and R. Frank  2008: A survey of attitudes virtually risk and uncertainty. Unpublished manuscript.

  • 2008: Probabilistic minds and cognitive mechanisms: Harmony or noise? In: N. Chater & M. Oaksford (Eds.) The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Scientific discipline (pp. 189-208). Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Coauthor: Henry Brighton.

  • 2007: Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics Coauthors: Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Elke Kurz-Milcke, Lisa K. Schwartz and Steven Woloshin.  Published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Volume eight, Number 2 (November, 2007)

    Comments: Statistical Literacy: A Prerequisite for Evidence-Based Medicine by John Monahan.

    Comments: Shared Decision Making Requires Statistical Literacy by Chandra Y. Osborn, PhD, MPH.  "Physicians have an ethical responsibility to be functionally literate in health statistics and able to explain information such as a test�s positive predictive value to their patients."

  • 2005: ��A 30% chance of rain tomorrow��: How does the public empathise probabilistic weather forecasts? Take chances Analysis, 25, 623�629. Co-authors: Hertwig, R., van den Broek, Due east., Fasolo, B., & Katsikopoulos, K.V.

  • 2004: Mindless statistics. Periodical of Socio-Economics, 33, 587�606.

  • 2003: Simple tools for agreement risks: from innumeracy to insight co-author: Adrian Edwards.  British Medical Journal, 327, 741-744.

  • 2003: Why does framing influence judgment? Journal of General Internal Medicine, 18, 960�961.

  • 1999. Overcoming difficulties in Bayesian reasoning: A respond to Lewis & Keren and Mellers & McGraw. Psychological Review, 106, 425�430.  Co-author: U. Hoffrage.

  • 1998: AIDS counselling for low-risk clients. AIDS Care, 10, 197�211. Co-authors: U. Hoffrage and A. Ebert.

  • 1995: How to improve Bayesian reasoning without didactics: Frequency formats. Psychological Review, 102, 684�704. With U. Hoffrage.

  • 1991: Probabilistic mental models: A Brunswikian theory of conviction. Psychological Review, 98, 506�528. Co-authors: Hoffrage, U., & Kleinb�lting, H.

  • 1987: Cognition as intuitive statistics. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Coauthor: D. J. Murray

  • Simply Rational: Decision Making in the Real World (2015)

    Product Clarification: Statistical illiteracy tin have an enormously negative bear upon on decision making. This volume of collected papers brings together applied and theoretical inquiry on risks and decision making across the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics. Collectively, the essays demonstrate why the frame in which statistics are communicated is essential for broader agreement and audio decision making, and that understanding risks and uncertainty has wide-reaching implications for daily life. Gerd Gigerenzer provides a lucid review and catalog of concrete instances of heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people and animals rely on to make decisions.

    Table of Contents: 1) How I Got Started Teaching Physicians and Judges Risk Literacy Role I: The Art of Risk Communication. 2) Why Do Single-Even Probabilities Confuse Patients? three) HIV Screening: Helping Clinicians Make Sense of Test Results to Patients. 4) Chest Cancer Screening Phamplets Mislead Women.      Part II. Health Statistics five) Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. six) Public Knowledge of Benefits of Breast and Prostate cancer Screening in Europe.     Part Three. Smart Heuristics. 7) Heuristic Conclusion Making. 8) The Recognition Heuristic: A Decade of Research.     Part 4: Intuitions about Sports and Gender. 9) The Hot Paw Exists in Volleyball is Is Used for Allocation Decisions. x) Stereotypes about Men'due south and Women's Intuitions: A Written report of Two Nations. Part V. Theory. 11) Every bit-if Behavioral Economics: Neoclassical Economics in Disguise? 12) Personal Reflections on Theory and Psychology.

    Excerpts:  Few pupils learn to see a connection between statistics in school and what is going on in their world. Why do schools contribute so little to statistical literacy? We believe their are four factors. Statistical thinking is taught (a) as well tardily in schoolhouse, (b) with representations that confuse immature minds, (c) with deadening examples that kill motivation and (d) by teachers who are unversed in statistical thinking. Statistical literacy should exist taught as early equally reading and writing. An essential requirement for starting early is a discrete (non continuous) concept of probability. Children can easily understand natural numbers, whereas proportions and continuous quantities are more difficult (Butterworth, 1999; Gelman & Gallistel, 1978). However many mathematics educators insist that probability needs to be introduced as a continuous variable along with continuous distributions. This theoretical vision is a major obstacle to a successful head first with statistical thinking.

    For example, at a conference on didactics statistics in schoolhouse, where we showed that children can easily understand statistics with detached representations (such as the accented number of cases, every bit in Figs. 5.3 and v.8), a mathematics professor asked why the frequentistic, discrete concept of probability was being emphasized, every bit opposed to the subjective, continuous concept (according to which a continuous probability distribution describes a person's degree of belief in a proposition, such equally that the side by side president of the United States will be Republican; see Barbarous, 1972). He seems to have been thinking about philosophical schools of probability, not virtually children. <snip> Statistical literacy is more than than learning the laws of statistics; information technology is about representations that the human mind can understand and think.


    Risk Savvy: How to Brand Good Decisions (2015)

    Table of Contents: Part I: The Psychology of Risk. 1) Are People Stupid? 2) Certainty is an Illusion. 3) Defensive Decision Making. iv) Why Do We Fright What is Unlikely to Kill United states?  Function Ii: Getting Risk Savvy. five) Listen Your Coin. 6) Leadership and Intuition. vii) Fun and Games. 8) Getting to the Heart of Romance. 9) What Doctors Need to Know. x) Health Intendance: No Determination About Me Without Me. 11) Banks, Cows and Other Unsafe Things.  Part III. Commencement Early. 12) Revolutionize School.

    Numbers may not prevarication, but they are certainly often misunderstood, according to German psychologist and hazard analyst Gigerenzer. We brand poor decisions on an array of problems, from wellness-care screenings to investment decisions to planned outings, considering we blindly rely on data that may exist incorrectly interpreted and reported. Gigerenzer draws on psychology, sociology, and math to explain how data can beginning off articulate and end up murky past the time it reaches its intended audition, leaving us helpless to make sound decisions most the risks involved. He notes that the chance of cancer is often misinterpreted and can lead to overzealous screenings and that Americans irrationally refused to fly afterwards the 9/11 terrorist attacks even though the risk of being killed in an car accident is much greater. Gigerenzer cautions readers to always look for a reference bespeak when information is quoted and to sympathise the departure between relative and absolute risk. This is a highly attainable look at the importance of data and the equally great importance of conspicuously understanding data. --Vanessa Bush


    Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (Evolution and Noesis) (5.2008)

    Product Clarification: Gerd Gigerenzer's influential work examines the rationality of individuals not from the perspective of logic or probability, but from the point of view of accommodation to the existent earth of homo behavior and interaction with the environment. Seen from this perspective, human beliefs is more rational than it might otherwise appear. This work is extremely influential and has spawned an unabridged research programme. This volume (which follows on a previous collection, Adaptive Thinking, also published past OUP) collects his most recent articles, looking at how people use "fast and frugal heuristics" to calculate probability and adventure and make decisions. Information technology includes a newly written, substantial introduction, and the articles have been revised and updated where appropriate. This volume should entreatment, similar the earlier volumes, to a broad mixture of cognitive psychologists, philosophers, economists, and others who written report decision making.


    Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

    by Gerd Gigerenzer (2007, 288 pgs, hc $52).  Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious is "a fascinating analysis of how human beings brand choices and judgments based on instincts.  Explains where gut feelings come from and the role they play in our decisions ... from business investments to choosing a mate. plenty of anecdotes that keep it interesting and relevant."

    Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly: Gigerenzer's theories about the usefulness of mental shortcuts were a small but crucial element of Malcolm Gladwell'due south bestseller Blink, and that attention has provided the psychologist, who is the manager of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the opportunity to recast his academic research for a full general audience. The key concept�rules of thumb serve us as effectively as complex analytic processes, if not more then�is simple to grasp. Gigerenzer draws on his own research as well as that of other psychologists to show how fifty-fifty experts rely on intuition to shape their judgment, going and so far every bit to ignore available data in club to make snap decisions. Sometimes, the solution to a complex problem can exist boiled down to ane hands recognized cistron, he says, and the author uses example studies to show that the Take the Best approach often works. Gladwell has in plough influenced Gigerenzer's arroyo, including the use of catchy phrases like the nada-choice dinner and the fast and frugal tree, and though this isn't quite as snappy as Blink, well, what is? Closing capacity on moral intuition and social instincts stretch the fundamental argument a chip thin, but like the rest will be easily absorbed past readers. Illus. (July 9)


    Heuristics and the Constabulary (2006)

    Review: "An first-class collection, and an important contribution to heady new work at the intersection of psychology, economic science, and law. Highly recommended for everyone interested in knowing how people actually behave--and in understanding how bodily beliefs affects the constabulary."   --  Cass R. Sunstein, Law School and Department of Political Scientific discipline, University of Chicago

    "For legal academics and policy makers who think that the use of heuristics leads to suboptimal decision making and the possibility of exploitation, this volume opens a window onto a more charitable view of heuristics: that they are fast and frugal decision-making techniques that may outperform statistical methods that purport to evaluate a fuller set of informational cues. It provides not only a conceptual overview of alternative understandings of heuristics but a number of interesting hypotheses about jurisprudence, rules of evidence and jury behavior, and barriers to implementation of formal legal commands."  -- Mark Kelman, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law and Vice Dean, Stanford Law School

    Book Description: In contempo decades, the economists' concept of rational choice has dominated legal reasoning. And withal, in practical terms, neither the lawbreakers the law addresses nor officers of the law conduct every bit the hyperrational beings postulated by rational choice. Critics of rational choice and believers in "fast and frugal heuristics" suggest another approach: using certain formulations or general principles (heuristics) to help navigate in an environment that is not a well-ordered setting with an occasional disturbance, as described in the language of rational option, but instead is fundamentally uncertain or characterized by an unmanageable caste of complexity. This is the intuition behind behavioral law and economics. In Heuristics and the Constabulary, experts in law, psychology, and economics explore the conceptual and practical power of the heuristics approach in police force. They discuss legal theory; modeling and predicting the problems the law purports to solve; the process of making law, in the legislature or in the courtroom; the application of existing law in the courts, particularly regarding the law of evidence; and implementation of the law and the impact of law on behavior.

    Contributors:  Ronald J. Allen, Hal R. Arkes, Peter Ayton, Susanne Baer, Martin Beckenkamp, Robert Cooter, Leda Cosmides, Mandeep K. Dhami, Robert C. Ellickson, Christoph Engel, Richard A. Epstein, Wolfgang Fikentscher, Axel Flessner, Robert H. Frank, Bruno S. Frey, Gerd Gigerenzer, Paul Due west. Glimcher, Daniel Chiliad. Goldstein, Chris Guthrie, Jonathan Haidt, Reid Hastie, Ralph Hertwig, Eric J. Johnson, Jonathan J. Koehler, Russell Korobkin, Stephanie Kurzenh�user, Douglas A. Kysar, Donald C. Langevoort, Richard Lempert, Stefan Magen, Callia Piperides, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Clara Sattler de Sousa due east Brito, Joachim Schulz, Victoria A. Shaffer, Indra Spiecker genannt D�hmann, John Tooby, Gerhard Wagner, Elke U. Weber, Bernd Wittenbrink


    Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Alive with Uncertainty (2003)

    Product Clarification: At the beginning of the 20th century, the begetter of modern scientific discipline fiction, H.K. Wells, predicted that statistical thinking would be equally necessary for citizenship in a technological world every bit the ability to read and write. Notwithstanding, a century on, most of us, from goggle box weather forecasters to the American President, seem to take no idea of how to reason about uncertainties. Accordingly, a number of books have marshalled a long roster of cognitive illusions as evidence of humans' fundamental irrationality. Detailing case histories and examples, this text presents readers with tools for agreement statistics. In so doing, it encourages us to overcome our innumeracy and empowers the states to take responsibility for our own choices.

    Review: "This is an of import book, full of relevant examples and worrying case histories. By the end of information technology, the reader has been presented with a powerful set up of tools for understanding statistics...anyone who wants to take responsibly for their own medical choices should read it" - New Scientist

    Review: Almost adults consider themselves numerate if they can perform the elementary functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication and partition. An understanding of the way numbers work is increasingly important as our lives become more and more than informed by them; many of the everyday decisions we have to make involve the understanding of complex figures, the news we hear is backed upwardly by statistics, we routinely talk of percentages and ratios in the most casual conversations. Still, even those who recollect they're thoroughly au fait with these techniques tin easily be fooled by the misleading presentation of figures, whether through deliberate misrepresentation by cynical politicians or advertisers, or bereft lucidity on the part of news reporters, doctors, lawyers and other influential individuals. In this volume, Gerd Gigerenzer attempts to illuminate this widespread misrepresentation and suggests clear paths of thought to be used when faced with 'incontrovertible' facts derived from spurious mathematics. Gigerenzer is non short of examples to illustrate his example. One, derived from the work of mathematician John Allen Paulos, concerns a TV weather forecaster reporting that at that place was a 50 percent chance of rain on a Saturday and a fifty percent chance of rain on the Sunday, and concluding that this meant that there was a 100 percentage run a risk of rain that weekend. This kind of functional innumeracy is plant again and again, from trivial examples such equally the to a higher place to those involving crucially important situations such as AIDS testing and mammogram results. This is no mere whine most 'falling standards', but instead points upward a general lack of perception in a cardinal area of our lives which materially affects the manner we make of import decisions. And it's a good read as well; the examples given are interesting stories in themselves and Gigerenzer is a lively narrator who moves smoothly from one affiliate to another. Add together to this a number of beguilingly simple methods towards clearer thinking and some fascinating sidelines on the nature of probability, and I reckon nine out of 10 readers will say their cats enjoyed this book. Probably. (Kirkus Uk)


    Adaptive Thinking (2002)

    Reviews (Amazon.com): In Adaptive Thinking, Gerd Gigerenzer follows upwardly on his earlier book, The Empire of Chance. Part of his new book, Adaptive Thinking, is a continuation of his before word. Gigerenzer reacts confronting the dominance of significance testing, and looks closely at how it has shaped psychological theories. In item, Gigerenzer places the "cognitive illusions" of Tversky, Khanneman, and many other behavioral scientists nether very close scrutiny.

    Gigerenzer's chief thrust is that humans did not evolve in the psychology laboratory, with good control of probability theory to assistance them piece of work on word problems. Instead, he argues, humans evolved in environments with lots of noise, and had to use regular features of the globe to develop simple and effective rules of action. In this, he echoes and extends the work by economist Herbert Simon in the 1950s.

    Take one of his examples: You live in Detroit. i in 100 new cars of brand X break downwards. x in 100 cars of make Y suspension downwardly. Your friend has car Ten, and it just broke downward yesterday. Which should you lot purchase? Well, clearly if you're "rational" you buy brand Ten. But consider:

    You live in a jungle. 1 in 100 children is eaten by a crocodile while swimming in the river. x in 100 falls to their death while playing in the tree. Just yesterday, little Bobby was pond and got eaten by a crocodile. Where should you let your kid play?

    According to Tversky, Khanneman, and other modernistic cerebral scientists, you would exist "irrational" to fear the river, since the long term probability of dying at that place is still only two out of 100.

    If we evolved in the jungle situation, is information technology any wonder that most people rely on the advice of their friend in the car situation? Does this make them "irrational?"

    Gigerenzer looks at the history of decision research, and offers a concrete and predictive plan for the report of human rationality. The book is adequately brusque, very interesting, and casts serious dubiousness on many aspects of contemporary cognitive research. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in psychology or decision making, even non professionals.

    Reviewed in Human Nature Review, 2002 Volume ii: 548-550 ( 12 December ) by Lisa Bortolotti, Philosophy Programme, ANU, Canberra Australia.


    Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox   (2001)

    "Bounded Rationality constitutes a milestone in the evolution of a framework for understanding human cognition." -- Robert Kurzban, Contemporary Psychology

    Volume Description
    In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals brand decisions under the constraints of limited noesis, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cerebral science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents with perfect information and unlimited time. Near forty years ago, Herbert Simon challenged this view with his notion of "bounded rationality." Today, bounded rationality has become a fashionable term used for disparate views of reasoning.

    This book promotes bounded rationality every bit the key to agreement how real people brand decisions. Using the concept of an "adaptive toolbox," a repertoire of fast and frugal rules for conclusion making under uncertainty, it attempts to impose more lodge and coherence on the thought of bounded rationality. The contributors view bounded rationality neither equally optimization under constraints nor as the study of people?s reasoning fallacies. The strategies in the adaptive toolbox dispense with optimization and, for the most part, with calculations of probabilities and utilities. The book extends the concept of bounded rationality from cerebral tools to emotions; information technology analyzes social norms, imitation, and other cultural tools every bit rational strategies; and it shows how smart heuristics can exploit the structure of environments.


    Simple Heuristics That Brand Us Smart  (1999)

    Review:  "In the past few years, the theory of rational (sensible) human behavior has broken loose from the illusory and empirically unsupported notion that deciding rationally means maximizing expected utility. Research has learned to accept seriously and study empirically how real human beings ... actually address the vast complexities of the world they inhabit. Unproblematic Heuristics ... offers a fascinating introduction to this revolution in cerebral science, striking a great accident for sanity in the approach to human rationality."--Herbert A. Simon, Carnegie Mellon University, and Nobel Laureate in Economics

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    The ABC Research Group I. The Research Agenda 1. Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd: Fast and Frugal Heuristics: The Adaptive Toolbox II. Ignorance-Based Determination Making  2. Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer: The Recognition Heuristic: How Ignorance Makes Us Smart 3. Bernhard Borges et al.: Can Ignorance Beat the Stock Market? Iii. One-Reason Decision Making 4. Gerd Gigerenzer and Daniel G. Goldstein: Betting on I Good Reason: The Accept The Best Heuristic 5. Jean Czerlinski, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Daniel G. Goldstein: How Good Are Elementary Heuristics? 6. Laura Martignon and Ulrich Hoffrage: Why Does I-Reason Decision Making Work? A Case Study in Ecological Rationality vii. Jorg Rieskamp and Ulrich Hoffrage: When Practise People Use Uncomplicated Heuristics, and How Tin can We Tell? 8. Laura Martignon and Kathryn Blackmond Laskey: Bayesian Benchmarks for Fast and Frugal Heuristics 4. Beyond Choice: Retentiveness, Estimation, and Categorization ix. Ulrich Hoffrage and Ralph Hertwig: Hindsight Bias: A Price Worth Paying for Fast and Frugal Memory 10. Ralph Hertwig, Ulrich Hoffrage, and Laura Martignon: Quick Estimation: Letting the Surround Exercise the Piece of work xi. Patricia M. Berretty, Peter M. Todd, and Laura Martignon: Categorization past Emptying: Using Few Cues to Cull 5. Social Intelligence 12. Philip Due west. Blythe, Peter M. Todd, and Geoffrey F. Miller: How Motion Reveals Intention: Categorizing Social Interactions 13. Peter Thou. Todd and Geoffrey F. Miller: From Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion: Satisficing in Mate Search 14. Jennifer Nerissa Davis and Peter M. Todd: Parental Investment by Simple Decision Rules Half-dozen. A Look Around, A Expect Back, A Expect Ahead 15. Adam S. Goodie et al.: Demons versus Heuristics in Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral Ecology, and Economis xvi. Peter M. Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer: What We Accept Learned (So Far) References Name Index Subject Index

    Reviews (from Amazon website)

    "How do people cope in the real, complex world of confusing and overwhelming data and apace budgeted deadlines? This important volume starts a new quest for answers. Here, Gigerenzer, Todd, and their lively enquiry group evidence that simple heuristics are powerful tools that do surprisingly well. The field of decision making will never be the same again."--Donald A. Norman, writer of Things That Make Us Smart and The Invisible Figurer

    "Gigerenzer and Todd'south volume represents a major advance in our understanding of human reasoning, with many genuinely new ideas on how people retrieve and an impressive body of data to back them up. Simple Heuristics is indispensable for cognitive psychologists, economists, and anyone else interested in reason and rationality."--Steven Pinker, author of How the Heed Works and Words and Rules

    "This volume is a major contribution to the theory of bounded rationality. It illustrates that the surprising efficiency of fast and simple procedures is due to their fit with the construction of the environs in which they are used. The emphasis on this ecological rationality is an advance in a promising and already fruitful new direction of research."--Reinhard Selten, Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn, and Nobel Laureate in Economic science

    "In recent years, and specially in the culture wars, many people have written near rationality. These authors at present provide a summary of this recent history, organized on the basis of different types of determination making. In each case, the authors summarize the literature then as to provide an implicit history. But the volume is more fundamentally aimed at making rationality workable by showing 'the way that real people make the majority of their inferences and decisions.'"--Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

    "The underlying argument of the book is that the environments in which we evolved and in which we now live have sure regularities, and that determination making mechanisms - both evolved mechanisms, and the mechanisms that we actually use today - take advantage of these environmental regularities. Virtually of the volume illustrates this argument by showing that in many circumstances shortcut decision making mechanisms (the 'simple heuristics' of the title) are remarkably authentic...This book by Gigerenzer and his assembly marks a significant advance in the analysis." -- Paul H. Rubin, Journal of Bioeconomics, Vol 2, 2000

    "The underlying argument of the book is that the environments in which we evolved and in which we now alive have certain regularities, and that decision making mechanisms--both evolved mechanisms, and the mechanisms that we actually use today--take advantage of these environmental regularities. Nigh of the book illustrates this argument past showing that in many circumstances shortcut decision making mechanisms (the 'simple heuristics' of the title) are remarkably accurate...This book by Gigerenzer and his associates marks a pregnant advance in the assay." -- Paul H. Rubin, Journal of Bioeconomics, Vol 2, 2000

    "Gigerenzer et al. take on a heroic endeavour of creating a grand theory of mind ..."--Gimmicky Psychology, APA Review of Books


    Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You (1986)

    Amazon.com: In the tradition of Innumeracy past John Allen Paulos, High german scientist Gerd Gigerenzer offers his own take on numerical illiteracy. "In Western countries, near children learn to read and write, but even in adulthood, many people do not know how to think with numbers," he writes. "I focus on the most important form of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical innumeracy--that is, the disability to reason well-nigh uncertainties and risk." The author wisely uses concrete examples from the real world to make his points, and he shows the devastating impact of this problem. In one example, he describes a surgeon who advised many of his patients to accept prophylactic mastectomies in order to dodge chest cancer. In a two-year catamenia, this medico convinced 90 "high-hazard" women without cancer to cede their breasts "in a heroic exchange for the certainty of saving their lives and protecting their loved ones from suffering and loss." But Gigerenzer shows that the vast majority of these women (84 of them, to be exact) would not have adult breast cancer at all. If the doctor or his patients had a better understanding of probabilities, they might accept chosen a different course. Fans of Innumeracy volition enjoy Calculated Risks, every bit volition anyone who appreciates a proficient puzzle over numbers. --John Miller --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

    From Publishers Weekly
    If a adult female aged 40 to l has breast cancer, ix times out of 10 it will bear witness up on a mammogram. On the other hand, nine out of 10 suspicious mammograms turn out non to be cancer. Confused? So are many people who seek certainty through numbers, says Gigerenzer, a statistician and behavioral scientist. His book is a successful attempt to help innumerates (those who don't understand statistics), offer example studies of people who badly need to empathise statistics, including those working in AIDS counseling, Deoxyribonucleic acid fingerprinting and domestic violence cases. Gigerenzer deftly intersperses math lessons explaining concepts similar frequency and run a risk in layperson'southward terms with real-life stories involving doctors and detectives. One of his main themes is that even well-pregnant, statistically astute professionals may be unable to communicate concepts such as statistical run a risk to innumerates. (He tells the truthful story of a psychiatrist who prescribes Prozac to a patient and warns him about potential side furnishings, saying, You lot have a xxx to l percent chance of developing a sexual problem. The patient worries that in anywhere from xxx% to fifty% of all his sexual encounters, he is going to have performance bug. Only what the doctor really meant is that for every 10 people who take Prozac, three to v may experience sexual side furnishings, and many have no sexual side effects at all.) All innumerates buyers, sellers, students, professors, doctors, patients, lawyers and their clients, politicians, voters, writers and readers have something to acquire from Gigerenzer'south quirky yet understandable volume.
    Copyright 2002 Cahners Business concern Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of impress or unavailable edition of this title.

    Calculated risks: How to know when numbers deceive you. New York: Simon & Schuster.
    (UK version: Reckoning with run a risk: Learning to live with uncertainty, London: Penguin).


    The Empire of Hazard (1989)
    by
    Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty, Lorenz Kr�ger

    Review: "...volition exist useful to statisticians, philosophers, scientists and other historians of science who want to empathize the roots of the probability-based statistical methods we use then widely today...The Empire of Risk is a valuable book." Science
    "In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probablilty and statistics, this book focuses on how technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind, and society. The piece of work is aimed at historians of science and philosophers of scientific discipline, but it is also directed toward scholars in other disciplines and therefore technical material is kept to a minimum." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

    Volume Clarification: This book tells how quantitative ideas of adventure take transformed the natural and social sciences as well as everyday life over the past 3 centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the nearly recent forays into police, medicine, polling, and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact on biology, physics, and psychology. In dissimilarity to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this volume centers on how these technical innovations recreated our conceptions of nature, listen, and society

    grantwhionstan.blogspot.com

    Source: http://www.statlit.org/Gigerenzer.htm

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