MrMind comments on Open Thread March 21 - March 27, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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:
LW's dog in this catfight is probably on the Kahneman's side, but the debate is interesting.
Well, probability is about reasoning with logic under imperfect information, and when you factor in the cost of elaboration you see that "ecological" model could be better, but evolution and thermodynamics. I think that simply distinguishing "correct" and "useful" dissolves the debate.
No, I think it's more complicated than that.
For example, imagine a complex decision, say what college to go to. Can you write out a Bayesian model that will tell you what to do? Well, kinda. You can, but it's going to be woefully incomplete and involve a lot of guesses without much support from data. A set of heuristics will do much better in this situation. Are you going to say that this Bayesian model is "correct" regardless? I don't think it's a useful application of the word.