Decision Science News

Gigerenzer, G., Hertwig, R., & Pachur, T. (Eds.). (2011). Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.

ONE IN TWENTY P = .05 RESULTS IS A FALSE ALARM ON AVERAGE If you’re not familiar with xkcd and you are a reader of Decision Science News, that’s a source of dissonance in the universe that merits dissolving. Enjoy today’s post (above), and if you are like us, you might want to make the [...]

Society for Judgment and Decision Making Newsletter Editor Dan Goldstein reports that the final SJDM newsletter of 2010 is ready for download.

GELMAN’S FIVE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS There’s a nice article in The Browser in which Statistician and Political Scientist Extraordinaire Andrew Gelman recommends five books. It is definitely worth a read. We learned something about baseball from it and have decided to buy a book on child rearing based on its recommendations. [We already knew the stuff [...]

December saw the passing on Robyn Dawes, without question a scholar who helped define the field of Judgment and Decision Making. The author of the field’s pre-eminent course text “Rational Choice in an Uncertain World”, Dawes was no doubt responsible for getting and keeping many students interested in the field. Dawes was an excellent writer. In addition to authoring what we think is the best-titled paper in the history of JDM “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making”, his books were some of the few we read without skipping a word from start to finish. Dawes is unique: a mathematical clinical psychologist (some say the only one), a past-president of the JDM Society, a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an academic with no fear of controversy, and much more.

TALEB INTERVIEWS FROM BEFORE AND AFTER THE DOWNTURN Making predictions is risky business. If you make a claim like “Dow 30,000 by 2008“, it’s more than a little embarrassing when you’re wrong. (If you’re wondering, the Dow’s peak was just over 14,000). But making predictions is important. Science, for instance, suffers when theories are vague [...]

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ANALYTICAL SOCIOLOGY With millions of people connecting in online social networks, researchers across academia are racing to make sense of the terabytes of new social data being generated daily. Some folks, like Duncan Watts, have been thinking about social networks for a long time, even before the online variants went viral. [...]

MAKING LUCK WORK FOR YOU Decision Science News was just at the ESMT Annual Forum in Berlin where we spoke in a session with Martin Weber, Gerd Gigerenzer, Stephan Meier, Luc Wathieu and Robin Hogarth and suddenly remembered that Hogarth, along with INSEAD’s Spyros Makridakis and Anil Gaba, has a new book out called Dance [...]

BANK FAILURE AND BLACK SWANS Fully aware of the Nostradamus effect and every “cognitive fallacy” under the sun, Decision Science News does have to hand it to Nassim Taleb for warning about the domino effect we’re now seeing in banking. Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other [...]

DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM? This post got us thinking about chart critique. Charts are things we like to judge, as graph rating systems, and the name of the blog Junk Charts suggest. What we wonder is will science ever be able to separate chart opinions from chart knowledge? Chart doxa from chart episteme? Consider [...]