4 ms·
"shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical treatments." But shallow processing can lead ER physicians to choose the correct medic
by MarcScott 12y ago
"shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical treatments."
But shallow processing can lead ER physicians to choose the correct medical treatment when time is of the essence.
These type of multiple-choice problems annoy me, admittedly because I'm bad at them, but also because you don't always want to over analyze the problem and waste valuable hours when a solution that 'will do the job' is a few seconds of mental processing away.
- the_af 12y agoI don't think anyone disagrees (even the author) that this kind of "shortcut" reasoning is valuable. People want to spend as little energy as possible, and that makes a lot of sense! I'm not a biologist or a scientist, but this probably makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is when this kind of thinking leads to terrible results. One example would be thinking the effectiveness of a medical treatment is pretty good, when it's actually worse than not administering the treatment. And doctors are guilty of this, which in this case has serious consequences and is not a multiple-choice riddle!
- tunesmith 12y agoThe question is how to tell the difference ahead of time - when is a heuristic approach going to lead to a "good enough" answer versus a "counterintuitively damaging" answer. It would suck if the only way to know for sure is to avoid shortcut reasoning in all cases.