This week I’ve been working my way through chapter 11 on judgement and decision making. I’m glad to say that the horrors of chapter 9 on working memory are now fading into the distance. It’s a good thing that working memory is so short-term otherwise I’d still be being haunted by the gloop, gloop, gloop feeling I had as my brain turned to mush when trying to get through that week. Both chapters 10 and 11 have been a lot more interesting. After reading through all of the material on subjective expected utility (SEU) and Bayes’ Theorem, I was relieved to find that ‘gut feel’ (or ‘fast and frugal’ decision-making as they call it in the chapter) often gives as good, if not better results than all of the more normative and prescriptive methods that are available.
Gigerenzer et al. have therefore given me a whole new justification, backed up by evidence from their studies, that simply picking the first option that looks about right is all I ever need to do. Simples! And there I was getting all worried about taking all of the evidence into consideration, assigning values to potential outcomes, churning through formulae and all of the rest of the stuff that business and management textbooks suggest is necessary. Well, I now know differently!
I’ve also had the mark back for TMA03 (the project proposal) today and I’m kicking myself that I made a typo in it that made it look as if I didn’t understand the design I’d proposed. I *knew* I had a 2×2 design, honestly, not a 2x2x2. Wretched and stupid project proposal form … grrrr. Still, my overall average is very good indeed for the first three TMAs – comfortably good enough I think to see me through the torture that will be TMA04 and TMA06 – essays – yuk!
I haven’t yet picked up enough courage to look at the options for TMA04 as yet … that’s for later next week, once I’ve broken the back of chapter 12 on reasoning.
It’s been a weekend of mystifying television too so far. I didn’t get what was happening in the England v Algeria game (and Wayne Rooney’s breathtakingly stupid comments to camera at the end of it made me resolve never to waste 90+ minutes of my life watching any game he’s playing in again … well, at least until they get to the final, that is) and I certainly didn’t get Dr. Who earlier on this evening either. This series has had far too much of a tendency to disappear up its own space-time continuum for my liking and as far as I’m concerned, the new actor playing the doctor is totally unconvincing.
If I start a campaign to bring back Tom Baker, will anyone else join me?