thinking - the new science of decision making problem solving prediction - john brockman

[...]... standard theory Homo economicus would have to find out all the possible options and all the possible consequences of marrying each one of them He would also look at the probabilities of various consequences of marrying each of them—whether the woman would still talk to him after they’re married, whether she’d take care of their children, whatever is important to him— and the utilities of each of these... 100 percent of the people prefer the kind of information contained in the brochure After all, who the hell wants to hear from some random guy when they can look at the brochure and judge for themselves? Nonetheless, if you actually give people one of these two pieces of information, they more accurately predict their own happiness when they see the random traveler’s report then when they see the brochure... into the wisdom -of -the- crowd argument the famous Francis Galton country fair episode in which the average of 500 or 600 fairgoers make a prediction about the weight of an ox I forget the exact numbers, but let’s say the estimated average prediction was 1,100 The individual predictions were anywhere from 300 to 14,000 When we trim outliers and average, it came to 1,103, and the true answer was 1,102 The. .. that the resurrection is the literal truth and all that, they must not disillusion those people But then they also realize that a lot of other parishioners are not so sure; they think it’s all sort of metaphor—symbolic, yes, but they don’t take it as literally true How do they thread the needle so that they don’t offend the sophisticates in their congregation by insisting on the literal truth of the. .. disguise their predictions They don’t say there’s a 7 likelihood of a terrorist attack within this span of time They don’t say there’s a 1.0 likelihood of recession by the third quarter of 2013 They don’t make predictions like that What they say is that if we go ahead with the administration’s proposed tax increase, there could be a devastating recession in the next six months “There could be.” The word... simply asked them to name a dozen other things that would happen in those days before they made their predictions, the game had far less impact on their predictions In other words, once they thought about how well-populated the future was, they realized that the game was just one of many sources of happiness and that its impact would be diluted by others When you study errors such as these, it is only... was assuming that political analysts were in the business of making accurate predictions, whereas they’re really in a different line of business altogether They’re in the business of flattering the prejudices of their base audience and entertaining their base audience, and accuracy is a side constraint They don’t want to be caught making an overt mistake, so they generally are pretty skillful in avoiding... expectations, many psychologists conclude that the mind is doomed to irrationality These are the two dominant views today, and neither extreme of hyper-rationality or irrationality captures the essence of human reasoning My aim is not so much to criticize the status quo, but rather to provide a viable alternative.” At the beginning of the 20th century the father of modern science fiction, Herbert George Wells,... make decisions based on just one or two criteria But these colleagues don’t analyze the environmental influences on the task They think that for a priori reasons people make bad choices because of a bias, an error, or a fallacy They look at constraints in the mind Neither of these concepts takes advantage of what the human mind takes advantage of: that the bounds in the mind are not unrelated to the. . .the details, but they know that the details are out there They could learn them in 20 minutes if they wanted to How did they get themselves in the position where they could so blithely trust people who they’d never buy stocks and bonds from? They’d never trust a child’s operation to a doctor who was as ignorant and as ideological as these people It is really strange I haven’t gotten to the bottom of . they get their ideas? Well, they get them from the hierarchies of their churches. Where do they get their ideas? Up at the top, I figure there’s some people that really should be ashamed of themselves analysts were in the business of making accurate predictions, whereas they’re really in a different line of business altogether. They’re in the business of flattering the prejudices of their base audience. lot of emphasis on the advantages of “blink,” on the advantages of going with your gut. There’s another school of thought that puts a lot of emphasis on the value of system-two overrides, self-critical