Gerd Gigerenzer is a strong advocate of the idea that simple heuristics can make us smart. We don’t need complex models of the world to make good decisions. The classic example is the gaze heuristic. Rather than solving a complex equation to catch a ball, which requires us to know the ball’s speed and trajectory and the effect of the wind, a catcher can simply run to keep the ball at a constant angle in the air, leading them to the point where it will land.

Links this week: Where is the literature on behavioural political economy? Bashing a paper that claims people search for meaning as they approach a new decade (i.e. at 29, 39, 49 etc.) Vernon Smith on Adam Smith. A bucketload of Charles Darwin’s papers are now available online.

I have been rereading Gerd Gigerenzer’s collection of essays Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty. It covers most of Gigerenzer’s typical turf - ecological rationality, heuristics that make us smart, understanding risk and so on. In the first essay, Gigerenzer provides four categories of approaches to analysing decision making - unbounded rationality, optimisation under constraints, cognitive illusions (heuristics and biases) and ecological rationality. At the end of this post, I’ll propose a fifth.

Links this week: Big ideas are destroying international development. Dream smaller. Appealing to my biases - the skeptics guide to institutions Part 1 and Part 2. Most published results in finance are false. Be mean, look smarter. Constructing illusions. Predicting complex genotypes from genomic data - for those who confuse these two statements: “The brain is complex and nonlinear and many genes interact in its construction and operation.

Philip Ball has an article in the December issue of Prospect (ungated on his blog) arguing that consideration of the genetic basis to social problems is a distraction from socioeconomic causes. The strawman punchline for the Prospect article is “It’s delusional to believe that everything can be explained by genetics”. The article has drawn a response from one of the people named in the article, Dominic Cummings. Ball suggests that Cummings presents “genetics as a fait accompli – if you don’t have the right genes, nothing much will help”, although this statement suggests Ball had not invested much effort getting across Cummings’s actual position (as contained in this now infamous essay).

In my review of E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, I quoted this passage which captures Wilson’s conception of the origin of cooperation in humans. Selection at the individual level tends to create competitiveness and selfish behaviour among group members - in status, mating, and the securing of resources. In opposition, selection between groups tends to create selfless behavior, expressed in greater generosity and altruism, which in turn promote stronger cohesion and strength of the group as a whole.

The re-eruption of the war of words between E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins has occurred just as I have come around to reading Wilson’s 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth. In an interview on BBC2 (watch it at the bottom of this post), Wilson stated: There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he’s a journalist, and journalists are people that report what the scientists have found and the arguments I’ve had have actually been with scientists doing research.

Links this week: W. Brian Arthur on economic complexity. A great article on humans as imitators. Higher latitudes have colder weather which leads to larger people which causes lower population and higher investment in children which triggers economic growth. An epidemic of over-diagnosis. Financial price data are converted into music, the music is played to a rat, then the rat guesses whether the price will fall or rise.

In the Pacific Standard, David Dunning of the Dunning-Kruger effect writes: A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don’t know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver’s license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot.

Links this week: The freedom to pursue informed self-harm has a long and noble tradition. What happens when behavioural economics is used to explain rational behaviour. A great summary of some of Gordon Tullock’s work. HT: Garett Jones Another study on the limited effect of parenting on IQ. HT: Billare via Stuart Ritchie What Hayek might say to Republicans. The long shadow of history on the distribution of human capital in Europe.