This question, and others of a similarly "dangerous" nature are mentioned in Steven Pinker's article "In defense of dangerous ideas" in the Chicago Sun-Times. If you haven't read it, you should. Hopefully the authors of this blog will stop being lazy and begin musing on some of the questions brought up in this article.
Random thought o' day - I haven't yet read Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer but I'll admit I'm a little intrigued, and a little worried. Should we take Michael Chertoff's pronouncement that he has gut feeling about a terror attack a little more seriously? Maybe we shouldn't laugh when Colbert jokes that he knows something is true "because his Gut told him so" because apparently.....
"Gut feelings correspond to neural processes that have evolved over thousands of years, and the decisions they give rise to are usually sound. Drawing on seven years of research, Gigerenzer argues counterintuitively that hunches and facts should be equally valid reasons for a search warrant and that the game-show contestant who knows the least is often the most likely to nail the million-dollar question. Without intuition, he says, we would drown in a sea of data points. But sometimes going with your gut is dangerous: for instance, trusting a doctor implicitly without taking into account fear of malpractice lawsuits or the lure of financial rewards for overprescribing. It's possible to learn how to spot those situations and hone your intuition-- but, alas, only at the school of hard knocks."
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3 comments:
"Hopefully the authors of this blog will stop being lazy and begin musing on some of the questions brought up in this article."
I wouldn't count on it.
Interesting to know.
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