Saqué un libro de la "biblioteca" de la empresa - Fooled by Randomness, de Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Es una regresión a los tiempos de facultad y estudio de la teoría de la decisión, así como temas de estadística, así que me resulta interesante y me ha despertado el interés por retomar el estudio de esos temas. Es una lástima, sin embargo, que lo encuentro un tanto básico desde el punto de vista académico, pero compensa el hecho de que el autor escribe de una manera muy elegante, mordaz y desfachatada a la vez.
Un extracto interesante:
Descartes´s Error presents a very simple thesis: You perform a surgical ablation on a piece of someone´s brain (say, to remove a tumor and tissue around it) with the sole resulting effect of an inability to register emotions, nothing else (the IQ and every other faculty remain the same). What you have done is a controlled experiment to separate someone´s intelligence from his emotions. Now you have a purely rational human being unencumbered with feelings and emotions. Let´s watch: Damasio reported that the purely unemotional man was incapable of making the simplest decision. He could not get out of bed in the morning, and frittered away his days fruitlessly weighing decisions.
Shock! This flies in the face of everything one would have expected: One cannot make a decision without emotion. Now, mathematics gives the same answer: If one were to perform an optimizing operation across a large collection of variables, even with a brain as large as ours, it would take a very long time to decide on the simplest of tasks. So we need a shortcut; emotions are there to prevent us from temporizing. Does it remind you of Herbert Simon´s idea ? It seems that the emotions are the ones doing the job. Psychologists call them "lubricants of reason".
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