Acccording to Gerd Gigerenzer, human beings tend to think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet, he argues, much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions.Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. Says Gigerenzer: "More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more." His talk is part of an ongoing series on "Behavioral, Social and Computational Sciences Seminars" organized by the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which aims to bring the benefits of computational science to disciplines that have largely been by-passed by the information-technology revolution until now.
Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. He has also published two academic books on heuristics, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics.
wish I had time to watch this...
But the main point is so important. So much of cognitive science and philosophy (not to mention AI) ignores this most obvious fact of the importance of intuition in our everyday human lives. Rational, logical thought is such a small percentage of what we actually do, even in a "toy" situation like playing chess.
Now, not all researchers agree that the path to understanding/creating higher intelligence is to figure out or mimic how human intelligence works. But since human intelligence is the only example out there that we know for sure is Intelligent (see Turing Test), it's incumbent on such researchers to explain *why* intuition and non-conscious processes are unimportant.