Böcker av Gerd Gigerenzer

A fascinating, practical guide to making better decisions with our money, health and personal lives from Gerd Gigerenzer, the author of Reckoning with Risk.Risk-taking is essential for innovation, fun, and the courage to face the uncertainties in life. Yet for many important decisions, we're often presented with statistics and probabilities that we don't really understand and we inevitably rely on experts in the relevant fields - policy makers, financial advisors, doctors - to analyse and choose for us. But what if they don't quite understand the way the information is presented either? How do we make sure we're asking doctors the right questions about proposed treatment? Is there a rule of thumb that could help choose the right partner?This entertaining book shows us how to recognize when we don't have all the information and know what to do about it. Gerd Gigerenzer looks at examples from every aspect of life to identify the reasons for our collective misunderstanding of the risks we face. He shows how we can all use simple rules to avoid being manipulated into unrealistic fears or hopes, to make better-informed decisions, and to learn to understand risk and uncertainty in our own lives.'Gigerenzer is brilliant and his topic is fabulous' Steven Pinker'Catchily optimistic and slyly funny' GuardianGerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on heuristics and decision making, including Reckoning with Risk.

"e;This is an important book, full of relevant examples and worrying case histories. By the end of it, the reader has been presented with a powerful set of tools for understanding statistics...anyone who wants to take responsibly for their own medicalchoices should read it"e; - New ScientistHowever much we crave certainty, we live in an uncertain world. But are we guilty of wildly exaggerating the chances of some unwanted event happening to us? Are ordinary people idiots when reasoning with risk?Far too many of us, argues Gerd Gigerenzer, are hampered by our own innumeracy. Here, he shows us that our difficulties in thinking about numbers can easily be overcome.

How eliminating "risk illiteracy" among doctors and patients will lead to better health care decision making.

Think less and know more. A sportsman can catch a ball without calculating its speed or distance. A group of amateurs beat the experts at playing the stock market. A man falls for the right woman even though she s wrong on paper. All these people succeeded by trusting their instincts but how does it work? In Gut Feelings psychologist and behavioural expert Gerd Gigerenzer reveals the secrets of fast and effective decision-making. He explains that, in an uncertain world, sometimes we have to ignore too much information and rely on our brain s short cut , or heuristic. By explaining how intuition works and analyzing the techniques that people use to make good decisions whether it s in personnel selection or heart surgery Gigerenzer will show you why gut thinking can change your world.

The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines.

How do people make decisions when time is limited, information unreliable, and the future uncertain? Based on the work of Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and with the help of colleagues around the world, the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has developed a research program on simple heuristics, also known as fast and frugal heuristics. In the social sciences, heuristics have been believed to begenerally inferior to complex methods for inference, or even irrational. Although this may be true in "small worlds " where everything is known for certain, we show that in the actual world in which we live, full of uncertainties and surprises, heuristics are indispensable and often more accurate thancomplex methods. Contrary to a deeply entrenched belief, complex problems do not necessitate complex computations. Less can be more. Simple heuristics exploit the information structure of the environment, and thus embody ecological rather than logical rationality. Simon (1999) applauded this new program as a "revolution in cognitive science, striking a great blow for sanity in the approach to human rationality. "By providing a fresh look at how the mind works as well as the nature of rationality, the simple heuristics program has stimulated a large body of research, led to fascinating applications in diverse fields from law to medicine to business to sports, and instigated controversial debates in psychology, philosophy, and economics. In a single volume, the present reader compiles key articles that have been published in journals across many disciplines. These articles present theory, real-worldapplications, and a sample of the large number of existing experimental studies that provide evidence for people''s adaptive use of heuristics.