Gigerenzer Chapters

Allison Brown STATS 2000 Dr. Bird 20 April, 2020 Thought Paper 5: Gigerenzer Chapters 1 - 4 For this thought paper for me personally I thought it would be best to discuss the questions on a chapter by chapter basis. Chapter 1: Uncertainty I found the example of “Susan’s Nightmare” to be particularly interesting. I remember earlier this semester we briefly talked about false positives/negatives with regards to different cancers but actually seeing an example of a “terminal” illness being a false negative with an actual person makes the issue seem more impactful than it did previously. Additionally, I found her reaction to being diagnosed with HIV to be interesting; “ … eventually lost her job … unprotected sex with another resident [of a house with HIV patients] … the physical distance she kept from him [her son] caused her intense emotional suffering” (Gigerenzer pg. 3). As a brief side note, I also found the bit about her being with an HIV patient to be alarming, at this time she was certain that she had HIV so didn’t bother with protection so how did she not then get HIV from her sexual partner? Her partner could have possibly not transmitted the disease or even not had HIV in the first place and could have been another false positive. Clearly, the false positive that ‘Susan’ and those around her experienced was mentally damaging and statistically way too probable. If false positives are becoming increasingly more common why not just test an individual again if they have a positive result? Chapter 2: The Illusion of Certainty I found this chapter to be more philosophically based than the previous. As a political sciences major I found the quote and bit regarding a line of thought from Immanual Kant to be relevant and interesting not only to questioning numbers and statistics but also to simply just being a positively contributing member to society in general; “Learning to live with uncertainty is a daring task for individuals as well as societies” (Gigerenzer pg. 22). I think that in current times with COVID-19 placing limitations on how certain we can be at the individual, state, and national level that these ideas reign true. In general, I find that people struggle with uncertainty, whether that is awaiting a medical test result or not knowing where you are going to live after your six-month lease is up puts a strain on people, and being statistically uncertain does so as well. When numbers do not accurately represent all of those with COVID-19 or who have died from the condition being statistically uncertain only adds to the stress. Chapter 3: Innumeracy Chapter 3 of the text examines and outlines four different ways that illusion is tied to innumeracy: illusion of certainty, ignorance of risk, miscommunication of risk, and clouded thinking. The first, illusion of certainty simply refers to making the transition from certainty to uncertainty and how/why that line is crossed. Ignorance of risk refers to when a person does not know, even roughly, how large a risk is either in their personal or professional life, “This differs from the illusion of certainty in that the person is aware that there may be uncertainties, but does not know how great these are” (Gigerenzer pg. 25). Thirdly is the miscommunication of risk, with this version of innumeracy an individual understands what the risks are but cannot clearly communicate them, “The mind tool for overcoming miscommunication is representations that facilitate understanding” (Gigerenzer pg. 25). Lastly, is that of clouded thinking which is when a person understands the risks but is unable to draw conclusions or inferences from them. An example of clouded thinking is when a medical professional knows the error rates of a clinical test and the ‘base rate’ for the disease, but not how to have the dialogue of thought that a patient who has a positive test result may not actually have the disease. These four types of innumeracy let Gigerenzer in the chapter further go on to discuss risk and ignorance of risks within the statistical context. Chapter 4: Insight This chapter examines how innumeracy can ultimately lead to insight and how natural frequencies are crucial in understanding how minds, including those of medical professionals, use insight to understand a problem they may face. I found the example at the end of the chapter including the English language with the base-10 system and how other languages utilize the base-12 system. Gigerenzer uses this example to make clear that, “Good numeric representation is a key to effective thinking that is not limited to understanding risks” (Gigerenzer pg. 49).