Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings was my first rigorous encounter with the power of heuristics in human behavior. He challenges naive definitions of human rationality that posit its congruence with cold, disinterested logic. Throughout the book, G demonstrates that quite often ‘rules of thumb’ outperform methods that attempt to model reality, form predictions from the model, and act based on those predictions. Such approaches are fragile to model error, require costly computations, and typically are not able to adapt robustly to noise.
