Heuristics & Critical Thinking in the Info Age 🌐

Link to this course:
https://click.linksynergy.com/deeplink?id=Gw/ETjJoU9M&mid=40328&murl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.coursera.org%2Flearn%2Fmindware
Heuristics - Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age

Most professions these days require more than general intelligence. They require in addition the ability to collect, analyze and think about data. Personal life is enriched when these same skills are applied to problems in everyday life involving judgment and choice. This course presents basic concepts from statistics, probability, scientific methodology, cognitive psychology and cost-benefit theory and shows how they can be applied to everything from picking one product over another to critiquing media accounts of scientific research. Concepts are defined briefly and breezily and then applied to many examples drawn from business, the media and everyday life.

What kinds of things will you learn? Why it’s usually a mistake to interview people for a job. Why it’s highly unlikely that, if your first meal in a new restaurant is excellent, you will find the next meal to be as good. Why economists regularly walk out of movies and leave restaurant food uneaten. Why getting your picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated usually means your next season is going to be a disappointment. Why you might not have a disease even though you’ve tested positive for it. Why you’re never going to know how coffee affects you unless you conduct an experiment in which you flip a coin to determine whether you will have coffee on a given day. Why it might be a mistake to use an office in a building you own as opposed to having your office in someone else’s building. Why you should never keep a stock that’s going down in hopes that it will go back up and prevent you from losing any of your initial investment. Why it is that a great deal of health information presented in the media is misinformation.
Sunk Costs, Cost–Benefit Analysis, Cognitive Bias, Decision-Making, Data Analysis, Statistical Inference
A very good course prof Richard has explained very difficult to understand concepts in a very simple language and made it easy for students to grasp the subject matter easily.,Excellent introduction to basic tools (awareness of some cognitive biases / heuristics, the importance of contextual factors, etc.) for sharpening our minds: It´s a must! :-)
We understand the world not through direct perception but through inferential procedures that we are unaware of. Our understanding of the world is heavily influenced by schemas or abstract representations of events. We are prone to serious judgment errors that can be avoided to a degree when we understand their basis. We make guesses about probability and causality by applying the representativeness heuristic based on similarity assessments which can be very misleading. We make judgments about frequency and probability by relying in part on the availability heuristic, judging things as frequent or probable to the degree that instances come readily to mind.
Heuristics - Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age
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