We can think up a sophisticated program in the…

We can think up a sophisticated program in the ant's brain that might explain its plex plex behavior, but we'll find that it does not work. What we overlooked in our efforts to speculate about the ant's brain is the ant's environment.

— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer

In the book

We trust tiny samples as if they were laws, when a handful of tosses is no law at all, whatever we pretend. The Nobel laureate Herbert Simon put the deepest version of it: a human being, seen as a behaving system, is actually rather simple — most of the bewildering complexity of our conduct is just the reflection of the complicated environment we are flying through, the same trap we fall into when we credit an ant with elaborate cunning that proves to be nothing but the shape of the ground it crossed. Even our proudest achievements, examined honestly, owe as much to surprise, coincidence, and plain luck as to any grand design. — Takeoff Into Chaos

Also belongs to

• The Mind in the Cockpit

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