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A review by oisin175
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions by Gerd Gigerenzer
2.0
A high level discussion that tends to use substantially more words than are necessary to get the point across. Written like most business books where you get a kind of vague point, followed by an anecdote, and maybe a slightly better explanation of the point. My bigger issue is that Gigerenzer dismisses the idea put for by Kahneman, Tversky, and others without honestly engaging with them. Kahneman's and Tversky's idea, as identified in Thinking Fast and Slow does not say that intuition is always error ridden and that conscious thought is always logical and computational. They also do not laud the value of complex models, nor do they pretend their model applies universally. Mischaracterizing these arguments in order to dismiss them undermines Gigerenzer's credibility, especially when his actual statements seem to agree with various aspects of Kahneman and Tversky.
Gigerenzer's lauding of the value of intuition and rules of thumb is also problematic because he elides over the idea that intuition must be trained into a person. Intuition is useful in situations where a person has ample opportunity for feedback, in a repeatable environment, and lots of experience. Gigerenzer kind of hits this point, but then also lauds business intuition, which fails all of these ideas. In fact, studies of the very class of leaders that Gigerenzer lauds for there intuition fail to demonstrate benefits significantly above the mean.
All in all, this book has something interesting to say, but the message gets undermined by overreaching and gross mischaracterization of supposed opponents.
Gigerenzer's lauding of the value of intuition and rules of thumb is also problematic because he elides over the idea that intuition must be trained into a person. Intuition is useful in situations where a person has ample opportunity for feedback, in a repeatable environment, and lots of experience. Gigerenzer kind of hits this point, but then also lauds business intuition, which fails all of these ideas. In fact, studies of the very class of leaders that Gigerenzer lauds for there intuition fail to demonstrate benefits significantly above the mean.
All in all, this book has something interesting to say, but the message gets undermined by overreaching and gross mischaracterization of supposed opponents.