sexta-feira, junho 26, 2020

‘Come on, this is serious’

"There is no general theory of how best to make decisions. Much of the academic literature on decision-making under uncertainty tries to frame the challenge as a puzzle. All decisions, it is assumed, can be expressed as mathematical problems. And potentially capable of being solved by computers. Your smartphone will tell you what restaurants are nearby, how to get there, and perhaps what you ate last night; but not where and what you want to eat now. The probably apocryphal but nevertheless illuminating story about a decision theorist contemplating whether or not to accept a job offer from a rival university illustrates this well: upon being urged by his colleague to apply tenets of rational decision-making under uncertainty and maximise his expected utility, as his academic papers suggested, he responded with exasperation, ‘Come on, this is serious.’
Humans have evolved to cope with problems which are not amenable to probabilistic reasoning 
...
Our brains are not built like computers but as adaptive mechanisms for making connections and recognising patterns. Good decisions often result from leaps of the imagination. Creativity was the quality exhibited by that unknown Sumerian who invented the wheel, by Einstein, and by Steve Jobs. And, as Knight and Keynes emphasised, creativity is inseparable from uncertainty. By its nature, creativity cannot be formalised, only described after the event, with or without the help of equations."

Trechos retirados de “Radical Uncertainty” de John Kay e Mervyn King

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