December 2021

Let me talk about an article that I want you to read. It is titled ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases‘, published in Science 1974. The paper is about heuristics, the mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions, and its inherent problems in real life. And the consequence? Implicit biases to gambling-addiction, stereotyping to micro-inequities.

We have seen in the past few posts how unreliable our intuitions about conditional probabilities can be. The authors give many stories to expose the errors in judgements that we are carrying.

I will go through their stories one by one in the coming days, but first, you read the paper.

Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D., Science, 1974 (185), Issue 4157, 1124-1131