3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Thinking More Efficiently
Mental Shortcuts, Social-Circle Heuristic & Misapplied Heuristics
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I. Mental Shortcuts
If you’re a regular reader of The Mind Collection, you’re probably familiar with the fascinating concept of mental shortcuts, aka heuristics. Here’s German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer refreshing our memory:
Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information. Because using heuristics saves effort, the classical view has been that heuristic decisions imply greater errors than do "rational" decisions as defined by logic or statistical models. However, for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical rather than an a priori issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world.
—Gerd Gigerenzer, Heuristic Decision Making
In other words, there are occasions when taking mental shortcuts can lead to more accurate judgements than going through a lengthy reasoning process.
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