Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

Most tasks require a combination of bonding and bridging: flashes of inspiration to identify the right approach, and long effort characterized by selfless teamwork to put it into practice.

People think harder when they fear their views may be challenged by outsiders.

But as soon as we formalize a rule of thumb into a target, it becomes a source of distortion.

Gary Klein, a psychologist who specializes in the study of expert and intuitive decision-making, summarizes the problem: “When the algorithms are making the decisions, people often stop working to get better. The algorithms can make it hard to diagnose reasons for failures. As people become more dependent on algorithms, their judgment may erode, making them depend even more on the algorithms. That process sets up a vicious cycle. People get passive and less vigilant when algorithms make the decisions.”16

The science writer Brian Christian had an answer: computers are able to imitate humans not because the computers are such accomplished conversationalists, but because we humans are so robotic.