Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

As a note, i'm picky when it comes both to writing and thinking. And i hate most books written by academics. Even the ones with good information (eg, Fodor's Modularity) are hard to read and filled with confusing, field-specific words. Not this book. It's really well written. Written in plain English, very few assumptions, very thorough analysis, lots of self-criticism, lots and lots of data (OK, that part is boring and can be skipped, but it's comforting to know it's there)

What's it about? Common AI, psych and economic decision and learning algorithms (decision trees, neural nets, Bayes, multiple linear regression, etc.) are compared to several absurdly simple algorithms the authors believe real humans use. The various approaches are compared and evaluated on the basis of performance, accuracy on training data, accuracy on test data (generalization) and amount of input data required. Tests are on the standard UC Irvine data learning test sets. Comparisions, outcome explanations and relevance to the human mind and the real world are provided. Explanations and analysises are easy to understand and pretty convincing

i've decided to use a lot of what was in this book in my software, things that have made my agents more natural and easier to implement. i absolutely love this book


Great book about cognitive pitfalls   July 19, 2003
 14 out of 16 found this review helpful

It's really meant for a technical audience since this stuff is so cutting edge, but you shouldn't wait till the results appear in Time magazine. The experiments and writing are very easy to understand, very clear. And you will be amazed by the simple ways in which our brain takes shortcuts in reasoning -- both making it stupid and making it smart. Be careful next time you try to reason using probabilities, you're better off using frequency.

My own background is in philosophy, where this type of work has been very important in undermining the assumption that humans are rational. We aren't. You should probably read Kahnemann and Tversky's books before coming to this though, since this work adds an interesting spin to the old irrationality debate: maybe some of it is GOOD for us!


Statistical, Mathematical, Academic   January 21, 2002
 91 out of 97 found this review helpful

As someone interested in the practice and theory of decision making, I came upon this book via a number of "listmania" lists that reccomend it. The first few chapters got me excited about the subject matter. The authors promised to present a new model for decision making, one that was simple, and one that works.

The ensuing pages compare several theoretical models, such as Multiple Linear Regression and Dawes Rule to their own Take the First and Take the Best models.

Most of the tests were simulated on a computer. You would feed each decision making model into the computer, and then feed in various data for it to make decisions on. One popular test is "Which is the most populated German City." The computer had data on various German Cities with populations over 100,000. It also had several indicators, such as whether it has a soccer team, or a rail system, or is a state capital. The system would present two cities, with the indicators, and the decision making model would figure out which was the most populous one.

Right now I'm in a chapter called "Bayesian Benchmarks for Fast and Frugal Heuristics." It's about halfway through the book, and I'm not sure I'll finish. While the second half sounds interesting, this book is highly academic and the authors are concerned with presenting proofs for everything they say, in detail. Sort of like a victorian novel that starts of by telling you what it's going to tell you, and then tells you several times. I may skim it because I do find the subject matter intereting.

I certainly don't regret buying this book, having mathematical models for decision making is certainly handy (as someone interested in AI), but I wouldn't call it light reading, nor would I reccomend it to a manager interested in the decision making process.

I found much more interesting "Sources of Power" by Gary Klein. Indeed, I consider Sources of Power to be one of the most informative and most entertaining books I've ever read, and wish more like it existed.

In summation, I found this book to be highly academic and theoretical. If you are a human being interested in the decision making process as it is carried out by humans, I reccomend the more hands-on Sources of Power by Gary Klein. If you are interested in simple, statistical models for decision making (the kind you can teach a computer), then pick up this book.