Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious | Gerd Gigerenzer

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious | Gerd Gigerenzer | an introduction to some aspects of decision making

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Gut Feelings: The ...

	Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious Gerd Gigerenzer Viking Adult, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

the substance missing from Blink

when reading Gladwell's Blink, I kept hoping that by the end of the book something about how my brain worked would be revealed. Well, I got a sense that the Blink-like decisions I made on a daily basis are more common than I thought and with a wider scope (racism etc). What was incredibly disappointing about Blink was that I walked away with no more insight. yes some examples were articulated, but this in some ways was not really the promise of the book. the promise of walking away with something concrete is fulfilled in Gut feelings, which is almost like a response to Blink; the author is saying to Gladwell "this is how its done, young jedi!". Get this book if you want to know why you fight with your spouse or why you get along with them. get this book if you want to understand how to improve yourself by having more insight into how your brain is wired. get this book and his other book on Risk, and you will become a better person. not a cheap promise.

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an introduction to some aspects of decision making

I liked the book for several reasons:

- it is a fairly fluent and coherent expose of the subject, although it probably requires some understanding of more basic concepts, such as decision trees, predictive values, utilities.
- it places in excellent perspective the issue of choice in health care. This is a much needed expansion on an already insufficiently taught topic of decision making in early ears of medical school. Equally, if not more importantly, the chapter about health care would be useful reading for any consumer of health care services. Or any critic of public policy - present or potential - regarding the health care system and the values that propel it. The principles of screening and dealt with well, although in an implicit rather than specifically targeted manner.
Educated intuition ("fast and frugal" decision making) is the only hope for an individual facing medical decisions; policy decisions soundly anchored in evidence rather than legalistic and narrow economic interests are the only hope of our national health system (or, as correctly pointed by the author, chaotic and unsystematic collection of uncoordinated health care delivery mechanisms).
- I, too, liked quite a bit the chapter regarding the morality issues. It will probably not be to the liking of more conservative readers despite its - in my opinion - very unbiased views.
I listened to the Audible.com version. I was lovely. I did not have the benefit of the book figures and references to "the last disc" of the series in this download were not useful. I did not find (yet) the web site referenced in the recording for those figures.
Overall - well worth the money and time spent.
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Fantastic find!

I have had acid reflux for about seven years now and after reading this book and applying their suggestions I have been off my medicine and feeling better than I have in years! I truly can't believe the solution was so simple after spending much time and money on doctor visits and medication that didn't work. I highly recommend this book to anyone suffering from digestive problems.

Insightful

I have to congratulate the author for this book, not only for being highly readable and informative, but more important, for the outstanding research and enlightening vision behind it. Intuition or gut feelings, the author clearly shows, "can outwit the most sophisticated reasoning and computational strategies". Plus, "there is no way around intuition; we could achieve little without it." Decision science has to be re-written in light of this and similar works.

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Truly interesting, but it's a one-insight book that gets repetitive.

This is a solid book, based on a very interesting insight: that in a lot of cases, more information doesn't lead to better decisions, but worse ones. As it turns out, the additional information only serves to obscure our view of the most important factor in the decision. This isn't just true for fallible human brains, but also when all the data is plugged into a computer for a big, nasty regression equation.

Cool, huh?

So why not five stars?

Because the book peaks in the first two chapters as Gerd Gigerenzer (truly one of the all-time great author names) very clearly explains his insight to you using the fascinating concept of how humans catch a fly ball. (Hint: it isn't by doing all sorts of subconscious calculations about speed and trajectory)

From there on out, it's just one example after another of the same concept. By chapter four, when new examples get introduced, you're already projecting out exactly how people traditionally view it and how Gigerenzer's research shows things actually work. The good news is that shows Gigerenzer is a good teacher; the bad news is that the book is clearly too long.

So I'd highly recommend this first two or three chapters of this book to learn about Gigerenzer's very interesting, counter-intuitive and well-explained insight. As soon as you feel like you get the idea, though, I'd move on to your next book - you won't be missing any new ideas.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5

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