
The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making - benbreen
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4451179/
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Merrill
Animals have to act in order to find food, water, mates, escape predators,
etc. Therefore, they need a nervous system that includes a fantasy machine
that can imagine alternative futures and that includes a choice machine which
can initiate actions to realize the chosen future.

Much of human existence consists of poor choices among improbable fantasies.

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mudil
Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a real eye opener to me.
The most amazing aspect of some of what he discussed was that human psychology
is so persistent, so intrinsic, that even experts that well know our
deficiencies still make mistakes in decisions on psychological tests.

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hansopanzo
If you want to have your eyes opened even more, you should also check out
Kahneman's debate with Gerd Gigerenzer spanning decades of scientific work.

Gigerenzer challenged Kahneman on the grounds that he has a very specific
definition of rationality, probability (single-case vs. relative frequency),
etc. and that many of the biases he claimed to have found can be made to
"disappear" once you apply a different concept of probability.

To give one example (I'm not 100% sure if I remember everything correctly): In
one of Kahneman's studies, he asked participants questions such as "Is Detroit
bigger than Anchorage?" and then asked them how sure they were of their answer
(e.g. 70% sure). In this case, people would systematically overestimate how
correct they were, and Kahneman concluded that there is an "overconfidence
bias". Gigerenzer repeated the study, but instead of asking the participants
for a confidence estimate at every question, he only asked them at the end how
many of questions they got right overall - and in this case, people's estimate
was actually very accurate.

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koolhead17
Ditto.

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cggart
I believe this illustrates the point:

[https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg](https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg)

