Gigerenzer’s Simple Rules
18th July 2021
Gerd Gigerenzer, a sixty-nine year German psychologist who has been studying how humans make decisions for most of his career, doesn’t think so. In the real world, rules of thumb not only work well, they also perform better than complex models, he says. We shouldn’t turn our noses up on heuristics, we should embrace them.
That view is increasingly gaining global attention. Partly because of the failure of complex models in predicting major events, such as the financial crisis in 2008, and the election of Donald Trump last year. Partly because Gigerenzer is backing what he says with some cutting edge research.