Heuristics and/or Rationality

Is it time for a heuristics based or a gut feeling solution rather than a fully rational scientific solution for the COVID-19 problem?

Kahneman and Tversky argued that human heuristics lead to many incorrect solutions. For example, they surveyed people with the following problem.

Linda is a 31 years old, single, outspoken, and a very bright woman. She has majored in philosophy. As a student, she was always concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

Linda is a bank teller.

Linda is a bank teller AND is active in the feminist movement.

Most people answered bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

Did you?

It is incorrect. Conjunction "AND" makes second statement rarer and mathematically the second answer does not make sense.

And they argue through many such examples the flaws in human gut feeling heuristic decisions.

Counter to this, was the philosophy of bounded rationality. In simple terms, rationality of decision making is limited by the information available and tractability of all the information, cognitive ability of the individual involved and the time available to take the decision. Gigerenzer, a pioneer working in this area, says risk can be estimated rationally if you know all possible outcomes and probability associated with each of these outcomes. On the other hand uncertainty cannot be estimated rationally because either you do not know all possible outcomes and/or all possible probabilities. In such cases, heuristics and simple thumb rules based on experience, expert knowledge.

COVID-19 solution currently is based on a situation which is between risk estimation and uncertainty estimation. A good combination of heuristics and rationality is required.

#heuristics #rationality #boundedrationality #covid-19 #datascience