Intuition and the Institute
The interview is in the New York Times (specifically, found at this link). It is an interview with Dr Gigerenzer about his new book
Is it just me, or is it the fact that whenever a scientist, however well-meaning and interested in intuition, comes to study it, I get left with a feeling that they don’t always know what they’re talking about?
I mean, take this Gerd, for example. Nice guy. He has a nice photo. Could be someone’s favorite uncle and maybe even cooks a mean dinner, but his view of intuition is, as ever, restricted. (OK, let’s be honest here. It could also be that my definition of intuition is somewhat wider than most peoples’, but that is a good thing as far as I can see.)
The reasons for my saying this become evident in the interview. It starts out OK by Gerd (I hope you don’t mind the informality, but for some reason I’m tripping over my fingers trying to spell his last name) saying that a gut feeling is a judgment is fast, it is not a calculation and you don’t know where it comes from.
Now, if there’s one thing guaranteed to make a scientist tetchy, it is not knowing
For example, he gives details of how going with your ‘first, best feeling’ allows you to outperform the most complex calculations. In this instance, it is a study of Chicago schools and their dropout rates. He says that you could do heavily detailed analyses of various factors or you could just find out which school had the best daily attendance. The former was not as accurate as the latter (although Gerd doesn’t say whether this selection was instinctual, intuitional or derived AFTER the analysis).
Then, strangely, he turns to the idea of playing the stock market based on pedestrians interviewed in Chicago and Munich. He says;
‘We asked if they were familiar with the names of German and American corporations traded on the stock exchange. Using the names of the most frequently recognized companies, we then made up investment portfolios.
After six months, the high-recognition portfolios, on average, gained more value than the Dow and DAX markets and some big-name mutual funds. The high-recognition portfolios did better than a portfolio we created from randomly picked stocks and another made up of low-recognition stocks. Over the years, we’ve repeated this experiment twice, in different ways. Each time, the intuitive wisdom of the semi-ignorant outperformed the calculations of the experts.’
Now, excuse me for being picky here, but where is there anything to do with intuition in this? People were asked whether they recognized trade names. That’s it. Period. Nothing else. Stocks were then bought in these companies. How is that intuitive?
It’s just another example of a scientist deciding that something should be labeled ‘intuition’ but not really having much of an idea what the label should be attached to.
In case you think that’s harsh, just read the following question and answer and ask yourself, ‘Has dear old Gerd actually answered the question?’
Q: Some of your critics say that gut instincts just aren’t scientific. What’s your answer?
A: We study these things, where intuition is good and where it’s not. One should also not overlook that in science itself, you need intuitions. All successful research scientists function, to a degree, on gut instincts. They must make leaps, whether they have all the data or not. And at a certain moment, having the data doesn’t help them, but they still must know what to do. That’s when instinct comes in.
Pardon me for saying this, but I’m not impressed by this at all.
He also gets confused with fear and intuition. He says that after 9/11, many people didn’t fly and took to the roads instead, thereby increasing the death rate and says that,
‘They had listened to their fear, and so more died on the road. These kinds of fatalities are easily avoided. But psychology is not taken very seriously by governments. Most of the research about how to combat terrorism is about technology and bureaucracy — homeland security. In this case, educating the public about their own gut reactions could have saved lives. ‘
Again, this is irrelevant. It speaks of people listening to fear, not about gut instinct. And how in the heck could you ‘educate the public about their gut instinct? You’d have to know what it was first, wouldn’t you? And how could you do that? If it is as he says, lightning fast and not a calculation, then it would seem pretty difficult to get any responses which were valid.
Oh, I just LOVE scientists who think poorly! But the strange thing is that they still have a lot of sway on public opinion.
But I like this blog. I like the fact that I can (and do) rail at ineptitude and uphold ideas I like. But the main difference between me and them is that I’m for greater inclusion and most the scientists or researchers are for greater exclusion.
One day…. one sweet day…..
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