Quotes from Gerd Gigerenzer

The most popular of these numbers is called "value at risk." No judgment or understanding of the assets is necessary; all you have to do is look at the number. Yet the world of money is an uncertain world, not one of known risks.

In the words of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them."19

In Western countries, for instance, it is legal for physicians to receive "bribes" in the form of cash by pharmaceutical companies for every new patient they put on their drugs.

bigger numbers make better headlines.

Risk literacy is the basic knowledge required to deal with a modern technological society. The breakneck speed of technological innovation will make risk literacy as indispensable in the twenty-first century as reading and writing were in previous centuries. Without it, you jeopardize your health and money, or may be manipulated into unrealistic fears and hopes.

By applying the same optical principles responsible for normal eyesight it was possible to extend vision artificially; similarly, the calculus of probabilities formalized the good sense that came naturally to the fortunate few to help out the befuddled many.

Cómo sabemos si es posible encontrar una solución óptima para un juego u otro problema bien definido? Un problema se considera «insoluble» si el único medio conocido para hallar la solución perfecta exige verificar un cierto número de pasos que aumenta exponencialmente con su magnitud.

Wenn man mündige Bürger haben will, muss man ihnen drei Dinge beibringen: Lesen, Schreiben und – statistisches Denken.

Testing should absolutely not be deployed to screen the entire population of men over the age of 50, the outcome pushed by those who stand to profit. I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven public health disaster. The medical community must confront reality and stop the inappropriate use of PSA screening. Doing so would save billions of dollars and rescue millions of men from unnecessary, debilitating treatments.

As late as March 2008 Henry Paulson, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, declared: "Our financial institutions, banks and investment banks, are strong. Our capital markets are resilient. They're efficient. They're flexible."25 Shortly thereafter, the entire economy was in turmoil. The risk models influencing Paulson's belief did not anticipate the scale of the bubble, similar to the turkey not anticipating the concept of Thanksgiving.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. Erich Fromm To be alive at all involves some risk. Harold Macmillan

El reconocimiento de marcas reduce las opciones; y para tomar la decisión final se añade el principio del segundo precio menos elevado. La base lógica es que si uno ha oído hablar de una empresa, seguramente es porque sus productos son buenos.

In one case the surgeon's peers defended his actions by saying, "Oh, he's got four kids in college."21 When his kids graduate, will he stop pulling out the scalpel so readily? In some for-profit hospitals, administrators set a quota of hysterectomies, knee surgeries, and other operations that surgeons are expected to perform every week, no matter which patients turn up.

To this day, the testimony of two independent witnesses counts more than that of two who talked with each other beforehand, and the same holds for the testimony of a witness who did not know the defendant than that of his brother. But how to quantify these intuitions? That was the question that gave rise to degrees of belief expressed as probabilities.