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The lead in is about Daniel Kahneman who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for his study of non-rational thinking in economic decisions. It's amazing that the noncognat

by russell 17y ago

The lead in is about Daniel Kahneman who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for his study of non-rational thinking in economic decisions. It's amazing that the noncognative aspects of economic decision making have been neglected for nearly 250 years. Those of you who have taken an introductory economics course have noticed the emphasis on "utils" and perfect markets. I guess this is because economics always wanted to be a science, even if dismal. The article goes on to discuss the non-correlation between IQ and non-rational decision making and the lack of measures for rational/non-rational decisions. Non-rational doesn't mean irrational, rather it encompasses emotions, gut feelings, biases, and such in decision making. Web developers and marketeers have some feel for this stuff. That's why we use web analytics and tinkering with design to see what gets the best click throughs.

tokenadult 17y ago
Actually, in the terminology of the article, and in the terminology of Kahneman, the issue investigated IS cognitive. For the authors who have done this body of research, "cognition" is a broader term than "intelligence," and what goes awry in the wrong decision-making that Kahneman observed is cognition that is of poor quality, that is irrational. The article claims that there ARE measures (tests) to distinguish rational decisions from irrational decisions. Many forms of irrational cognition, as the author of the submitted article acknowledges, are biased to go wrong in one way rather than another because of emotional factors and the like, but the error is still fundamentally a cognitive error. It is a very good idea for web developers to test their assumptions with carefully designed observations. Sometimes those observations can lead to surprising, counterintuitive results that produce a significant business advantage. The author of the submitted article says (in other writings) that individuals developing strong skills of rationality is important in a world in which businesses try to take advantage of irrational thinking to sell products to consumers.

by russell 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago

Actually, in the terminology of the article, and in the terminology of Kahneman, the issue investigated IS cognitive. For the authors who have done this body of research, "cognition" is a broader term than "intelligence," and what goes awry in the wrong decision-making that Kahneman observed is cognition that is of poor quality, that is irrational. The article claims that there ARE measures (tests) to distinguish rational decisions from irrational decisions. Many forms of irrational cognition, as the author of the submitted article acknowledges, are biased to go wrong in one way rather than another because of emotional factors and the like, but the error is still fundamentally a cognitive error. It is a very good idea for web developers to test their assumptions with carefully designed observations. Sometimes those observations can lead to surprising, counterintuitive results that produce a significant business advantage. The author of the submitted article says (in other writings) that individuals developing strong skills of rationality is important in a world in which businesses try to take advantage of irrational thinking to sell products to consumers.