This post supports heuristics as a practical tool for decision making. The proponents of heuristics score a few points when it comes to managing firefighting situations or dealing with the world of randomness, where a deep subject knowledge offers no added advantage. Heuristics suffer from shortcomings that prevent them from helping the world pull out from its biases and fallacies. I will end this article with some observations that I found in the book by Gigerenzer et al.
What is Heuristics?
It is a method of solving practical problems without using extensive rational knowledge. While it is not random guesswork, it can be closer to making educated guesses. It uses the characteristic evolutionary traits of our species in responding to external stimuli. One popular book which comes closer to this description is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
Claims of Heuristics
Heuristics claims superior decision quality with a minimum amount of information. They frequently use the adjectives such as simple, practical, minimalist to describe the technique. I will focus on the book of Gigerenzer et al. in the rest of the post. The book is titled, The Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart.
Toolkits and Workflows
The book opens with an example of managing heart attack victims with the help of a simple checklist. What you see in the list are a few simple questions. They included noting the patient’s systolic blood pressure, age, and heartbeats. Follow this short and sweet classification hierarchy, and you just made a decision.
The book conveniently ignores the origin of how those few vital parameters ended up on the list and what type of history-matching (not the so-called experience) done to those parameters. In other words, the checklist is not something the specialist made up at that moment, however appealing that thought could be. And it doesn’t ignore any quantitative information as the authors appear to claim. Each of the questions in the checklist suggests something about prior knowledge (data), the pillar of Bayesian thinking. It is like claiming pre-cooked meals as an invention to replace a complex cooking process. It is just an illusion to the customer; someone (or a machine) needed to cook somewhere.
Appeal to authority and Appeal to emotions
It is no coincidence that the authors fell into the trap that has been the main criticism against the heuristics – that they can not avoid logical fallacies. The first page itself gives two examples. Starting with a quote attributed to Isaac Newton:
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Then comes the opening sentence:
A man is rushed to a hospital in the throes of a heart attack. The doctor needs to decide quickly whether the victim should be treated as a low-risk or a high-risk patient.
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group
The subject did not require either of the two quoted statements to prove its point. Heuristics is a practical recipe in decision making.
Final verdict
The book’s proposal to replace the first revolution (computing probabilities etc.) with the second one (adaptive toolbox with fast and frugal heuristics) is rejected! It is pure short-sightedness. Instead of abandoning probability, the alternative proposal may be to promote heuristics as a practical tool. And working side by side with its older sister is no shame.
The quote, “Truth is ever found …” is utter nonsense; sounds nice but far from the truth!
