How reliable are gut feelings? Should we trust ours or those of others around us? Are gut feelings based on reliable mechanisms or are they arbitrary whims of our baser instincts? These are just some of the questions that Ken and John address in today’s program features Prof.Gerd Gigerenzerfrom the Max-Planck Institut in Berlin.
Right out of the gate, John brings up the phenomenon of chicken sexing. Baby chicks all look the same. This makes it hard for chicken hatcheries to pick out the male chicks (which they need to eliminate). But certain people, chicken sexers, can tell the difference between male and female chicks, without knowing how in fact they do so. They simply follow their gut feelings. And they are exceedingly accurate in their assessments.
But Ken is unconvinced. He argues that while gut feelings might be useful in telling apart baby chicks or affairs of the heart, it seems preposterous that they could successfully guide our decision in mathematically complex matters like investing money.
为了更好地解释这个问题，约翰和肯请来了盖德·吉仁泽(Gerd Gigerenzer)。在他的研究中，Gerd发现，我们的直觉倾向于在特定的情况下专注于一两个最重要的因素，而忽略其他因素。此外，如果我们遵循这些直觉，即我们的直觉，我们比我们审慎地权衡利弊，我们做得更好。我们不知道我们直觉的原因，也不知道我们是如何产生它们的——它们似乎只是突然出现在我们的意识中——但它们在做决定时是有价值的指南。
Both John and Ken are concerned that if someone can’t provide the reasons for her decision, and simply cites her gut feeling, justification for that decision will be hard to come by. How can we convince others to go along with our decisions, if we cannot account for how we arrived at those decisions nor produce any explicit reasons for accepting them? Gerd argues that performance should be the standard by which we measure reliability of intuitions. Judging by performance, expert intuitions are enormously successful in their particular fields. It is time, according to Gerd, that we start accepting the gut feelings of experts as reliable sources of decision-making in fields like business, politics, the law, and medicine.
- Roving Philosophical Reporter: Caitlin Esch (seek to 5:30) interviews people whose gut feelings have lead them out of precarious situations and even saved their lives.
- 60-Second Philosopher: Ian Shoales (seek to 46:12) muses about a new stadium in Santa Clara, monster trucks, Lady Gaga, and why lawyers never lead to a good time.
