Andrew Gelman mentioned "the Kahneman-Gigerenzer catfight, or more generally the endless debate between those who emphasize irrationality in human decision making and those who emphasize the adaptive and functional qualities of our shortcuts." This looked worth checking, so I followed the link to the following statement by Gigerenzer:
The “half-empty” versus “half-full” explanation of the differences between Kahneman and us misses the essential point: the difference is about the nature of the glass of rationality, not the level of the water. For Kahneman, rationality is logical rationality, defined as some content-free law of logic or probability; for us, it is ecological rationality, loosely speaking, the match between a heuristic and its environment. For ecological rationality, taking into account contextual cues (the environment) is the very essence of rationality, for Kahneman it is a deviation from a logical norm and thus, a deviation from rationality. In Kahneman’s philosophy, simple heuristics could never predict better than rational models; in our research we have shown systematic less-is-more effects.
LW's dog in this catfight is probably on the Kahneman's side, but the debate is interesting.
Not necessarily. "You can't do inference without making assumptions".
Is it even a fight? What is it that they disagree about? Neither side is saying "Decision heuristics that once worked well still work well in our changed world".
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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