0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
$26 for the Kindle Version?!?!, 2008-10-26
I agree with most of the other reviews that the book is well written but will likely be enjoyed only by those who are interested in a more academic approach to the subject. I am giving this book one star primarily because of the authors' decision to price the Kindle version of this book at $26.00. I ordered the book at Barnes and Noble (and read about half of it the day it came in) but held off buying it because I saw on my cell phone that a Kindle version was available. What I missed was the $26.00 purchase price. Shame on you. The whole idea of Kindle is that the author's costs are practically eliminated, and that this savings is shared with the purchaser. $26.00 is just plain greedy. This is one customer you will not be profiting from. I will finish reading the book at the library or book store.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Worthwhile Insight into Mental Shortcuts, 2005-10-14
People aren't computers. Human beings live in a real world of scarcity and constraint. Even though time and information may be scarce, human beings must make high-stakes decisions. Probability and logic offer models for the thought process of choosing between alternatives, but decision makers often do not have enough hours, data and skill to use these sophisticated approaches. Fortunately, some rough and ready cognitive shortcuts perform as well as or better than the most elaborately sophisticated models - at least in the real world context of limited information and time. Working with the ABC Research Group, authors Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd explore some of those shortcuts, called "heuristics." They discuss in length and depth a series of experiments that demonstrate the value of heuristics. This is not light reading. It requires a level of comfort with academic style, mathematics and symbolic logic. Readers unfamiliar with cognition literature may find it a struggle - but we believes that those who persevere will find enough new insight to make the effort worthwhile.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Gigerenzer's clearest text - very inspiring., 2005-09-19
Gerd Gigerenzer is probably THE guru in heuristics - the art of picking a few shorthand rules to help us make complex decisions - but I found other works of his (Adaptive Thinking, Bounded Rationality) pretty dry going. By contrast this volume - a collection of stimulating, sometimes provocative essays by members of the ABC Research group (the centrer for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition) explores many facets of Heuristics and even puts heuristics to the test against other more computationally complex techniques to pick the outcomes for several complicated problems. Time and again, the simple rules of thumb out-perform the grindingly thorough statistical routines. For anyone researching human behaviour, the implicit challenge is to stop asking huge batteries of questions - and to look instead for the little telltale rules by which people navigate their complicated environments.
I'd say that if you were just starting to look at heuristics, then this this volume of essays would be a good starting point. Even if you skip the super-technical pieces, there's plenty of thought provoking material written in a lively, unexpectedly "human" style.
48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
Well, i liked it anyway, 2003-12-29
Whether you like a book depends on what information you're looking for. i make computer models of human behavior so this book, which is easy to read but filled with concrete solutions and lots of supporting dat, was near-perfect for meAs 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
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Great book about cognitive pitfalls, 2003-07-19
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!